Meet Abraham Guevara | Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Abraham Guevara and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Abraham, is there a quote or affirmation that’s meaningful to you?
“There is a time to create and a time to produce.” – Sitt Nyein Aye. He was my mentor.
As artists we yearn to uncover deeper meaning in our lives and the world around us. That requires vulnerability and uninhibited imagination. We experiment and play with our materials and media to create an idea. As an artist, I am also a businessperson. The concerns of a businessperson are different than those of the artist. The businessperson takes the ideas and assesses what is marketable.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I’m a truly interdisciplinary artist. I make illustrations, sculptures, sound work and audio/visual installations. I usually have multiple concurrent pieces going on to express myself in the different medias. A lot of spinning plates. My first love is drawing and illustrating, but in the last few years I’ve created multiple immersive installations, mostly with projection mapped content. It allows me to have the utmost flexibility when in the ideation stage of a new project. I truly love to learn new techniques and tools, and my ability to hyper-focus on things helps me get through steep learning curves. Recently, I’ve been exploring digital animation/simulation projects that embeds real world data (climate data, geological data, etc.) into subjective artwork. Science is the other side of the coin from art. We both dive into our minds and practices to better understand things. As some say, science is the universe meditating on itself and art is the universe expressing itself. I take that concept to heart and dive into subjects like extinctions (mass or limited), climate change, social sciences and astronomy. It’s really fascinating what humans have discovered and created throughout our time on earth, but we are also perpetrators of some of the worst atrocities ever recorded. Humans are capable of a lot, but it’s not always good. That is the nature of surviving in Earth’s biosphere.
The arts and sciences are not universally respected and are often under threat from authoritarianism and dictatorships. We can see this happening in real-time in America and around the world. It is important to stand together and push back against this kind of violence. Arts and sciences are on the frontline.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
First and foremost would be the James Turrell Skyspace in Green Mountain Falls, Co. Afterward, we would check out the other works on display, like a Richard Serra piece hidden in the mountains.
After that would be a series of kayaking and hiking trips in the Sangre de Cristo mountains where I grew up. I was born and raised in Southern Colorado, and Trinidad is close to my heart, so a trip there would be necessary too.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
My mentor, Sitt Nyein Aye. He was an artist, activist and writer that was exiled from his country during the 1988 student revolution in Burma/Myanmar. His encouragement and mentorship helped me get back into school to get my degree in visual art. He made art until the day he died and it’s up to me and his other students to continue using art to fight for human dignity.

Instagram: Abraham_guevara_arts