Illustration in Context: Zina Saunders: Painted, Digicut & Animation

Ever since I was a kid I’ve seen older Puerto Rican men riding crazy, tricked-out bicycles, loaded with mirrors and flags and chrome and fuzzy dice and raccoon tails. I’ve always wanted to paint their pictures and find out why they decorate their bicycles and how they got started, and what this bicycle display is all about. I tracked them down to where they hang out, drinking beer and showing off their bikes. I painted their pictures and asked them questions about who they are and how they got started with customizing their bicycles. These guys are members of an insular community with their own aesthetic, one that the mainstream culture knows nothing about. They are sincere and passionate and delighted with their one-man parades. Their bicycles are their personal vision of beauty and art that they are always tinkering with, perfecting and adjusting and planning and applying, and then riding down the street for everyone to see. That began my mission to discover the seemingly endless variety of enthusiasms pursued by New Yorkers, whether they were carried from immigrants' cultures from overseas or indigenous to the City landscape. These are real New Yorkers who have found fascinating ways to unleash their joy on the roofs and rivers and parks and streets of New York.

Ms. Sanders is currently involved in a show at the New Britain Museum, calledPixellated: The Art of Zina. Ms. Sanders was asked along with other artist to provide themuseum with an “artist statement.” She believes that artist’s statements are a bunch ofmalarkey, to her way of thinking. This is what she wrote in support of her statement.

I don't believe in artist’s statements. I mean I literally don't believe in them: I don't believe they exist for any reason. I believe they are an invention of the art establishment, the rich and mighty people who sit on museum boards and control the grant-giving foundations, forcing us to contort ourselves into mealymouthed buffoons, just so our pictures will be stuck on the creamy walls of institutions around the globe. I protest this fiction.

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