Felix Quintana: I was born and raised east of the Watts Towers in Lynwood, California. My parents landed in L.A. after fleeing the Salvadoran Civil War in 1984, and they had me in 1991. As a kid, portions of my summers were spent in El Salvador, revisiting my mom’s hometown, a small city called Ahuachapan, which is about seventy miles from the Guatemala border. This was an enlightening time for me, teaching me a lot about the myth of the American Dream very early on in my life. Growing up in Southeast L.A. filled me with a lot of love, ceaseless oldies and cumbia, Saturday-morning cartoons, and trips to the callejones of Downtown Los Angeles. My mother worked as a nanny in Encino, and some of my earliest memories were going with her to work and seeing the 1984 Olympic Murals on the 101 Freeway. I ultimately became aware of the residual effects of the 1992 L.A. uprisings on my side of town, including the straining reality of gangs, racism, poverty, and subsequent alienation for being Salvadoran-American.

Above all else, I grew up heavily influenced by West Coast hip hop, graffiti, my Salvadoran roots, and Los Angeles street culture. My dad taught me from a young age that I can work for myself, as he was self-employed, running a handyman business. My teen years were spent listening to KDAY and KJAZZ on the radio, keeping my dad company on residential and commercial projects. I sold my first artwork to one of my dad’s clients in the Pacific Palisades who had a few David Hockneys in her collection. Luckily, I felt very supported by my father in pursuing a career in art, although my mom wasn’t always convinced. Still, I knew since I was five years old that I was going to be an artist.

FQ: For over ten years, I’ve sustained a multidisciplinary practice that includes photography, digital media, drawing, painting, writing, and social practice. In high school, I taught myself how to shoot 35mm film out of necessity to document graffiti, street life, and L.A. youth culture. I took to experimental processes in photography, such as cross-processing film and painting with a photo developer. My dream was to make images with the same intensity and improvisational language as jazz.

I eventually moved to Northern California to study fine-art photography and studio art, creating work that focused on identity, memory, and place. I began creating double-exposure images through layering 35mm negatives in the darkroom, which I ultimately translated into a digital-photographic process. After experimenting in almost every discipline, I eventually focused my energy on photography with a strong foundation and affinity for writing and drawing. The camera wasa perfect fit for finding my voice, and so far, it has given me so much. I owe a lot to it.

FQ: In many ways the themes of my work have been consistent since the early days. I’ve been focused on balancing my responsibility to the localized L.A. language and experience with my own idiosyncratic voice, particularly as a first-generation Salvadoran-American. I felt it was crucial to simply document, archive, and distribute my work. I shared my early photographs on a personal blog, updating it frequently for my friends and small community to enjoy.

Once I began my training in fine-art photography, my work became a much more private process, which was a technique to make sense of my own identity, home, and family. I currently make work that is focused on collective memory and struggle, going back to the same well of knowledge. Now my work has the capacity and precision to spark a meaningful dialogue about the waves of urbanization, suburbanization, gentrification, and the importance of resisting these forces to protect the legacy of working class, Black and brown folks in Los Angeles and beyond.

FQ: It is so important for me to have ownership in my work, which means sustaining a lifelong process of learning from my work and having a responsibility for the depth and nature of it. I’ve always known that it would be important to document, archive, and distribute a sense of who I am and where I come from, especially amidst a popular media, news, and visual culture that often misrepresents Latinx communities, Central American migrants, and the youth. We need to see ourselves clearly, to possibly feel substantial enough to live a life that is worth living.

I believe art has that capacity to make up for lost time, filling that missing role of representation. I take my work seriously because I am the first generation in my family that has been able to dedicate my life to pursuing art and one of few individuals from my neighborhood that was given a chance to go deeper. I could’ve easily fallen behind, or succumbed to the woes of the streets, but I simply chose a different path for myself. My work is proof of our struggle.

FQ: Within my community, access, solidarity, and equity seem to be at the height of the conversation. How can cultural producers find innovative ways to create collective and inclusive autonomy? As we know, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx artists are purposely left out of the conversation, which means there is necessary room to fill in museums, art schools, galleries, and academia. It has become vital to unlearn and “unforget” the conventional path of an artist, of an art school, and our relationship to modernity. These systems were never quite built to hold people like me.

I often look around the room, the seminar, or the conference call and notice I am one of few brown folks that has fought for the opportunity to make it this far. Our presence is simultaneously lacking where it is desperately needed. When the position from audience to leader is flipped, and I am the one giving the class as an instructor, then all the sacrifice becomes worth it—my light is able to illuminate where it was most dim, and I become the symbol of possibility for my students.

FQ: I believe that protesting requires a common taste for activism and creativity, and that the artist cannot be separated from this action of movement building. My social practice work with think tanks, coalitions, and community organizations has proven to me that art does indeed make the change and revolution potent. This is especially imperative when artists and activists are invested in their community struggle, cause, or action, as opposed to being outsiders looking in.

There is an intuitive beauty that is felt when we see protest art, whether the signs people paint on the floors of their living room, or the labored work of an artist and activist. When we see demonstrations before our eyes, or participate in sharing a post to gain elected leaders’ attention on social media, the intensity for action is made clear, with little room for question. When we are brave enough to use our voice and take a stance as an artist, activist, or cultural worker in solidarity for a common cause, then this is when real change will undoubtedly materialize.

FQ: I think of this all the time, and it often starts for me in the classroom, gallery, or wherever we hold space for learning. My work as a teaching artist and educator is to serve the youth, my students, and other educators in reimagining what the pedagogy of art, photography, and media can be. We were taught by teachers who were taught by their teachers, often instilling the same restricted, neutral, and exclusive curriculum. This is very problematic, and the same conditions apply for art that lives in museums, institutions, and public spaces. I believe artists are always teaching through their work, whether directly or indirectly, and ultimately this is one of the greatest and overlooked moments for social change on an intimate level.

FQ: Traveling back to El Salvador as an American youth was illuminating for me. I was able to witness the contrast of my privilege in relation to my family and social circle with the overall framework of life in El Salvador. What emerged was a deep connection to empathy, which was passed down to me by my father, who went to great lengths to spread empathy and happiness, allowing for folks to step out of the sorrow of reality if even for a short moment. I became deeply invested in empathy for the rest of my life, which I firmly believe led me to become a creative individual and work toward building emotional connections in my lifelong pursuit of being an artist and educator.

Collaborating with like-minded individuals and being able to identify the needs of a community have become important parts of my art and teaching practice. I was taught to be more invested in who I teach than what I teach, meaning that if I truly know my students, then I will be able to reach them in more meaningful ways. Somehow, we lost this part of ourselves as a society and have become desensitized to seeing others at an eye level.

My ongoing series Los Angeles Blueprints reflects this passion greatly by being in direct conversation with the viewer about the grace, importance, and courage of marginalized Black and brown communities in Los Angeles. It is out of pure love that I make this work, in order to transmit the same level of respect that I have for my community to the viewer. It’s so important for me to reframe my own existence and project affinity where many see indifference and sympathy where others see apathy.

FQ: The biggest lesson has been trusting my own process, which is constantly challenged by what we believe the art should be, or what others want from our work. Showing up for my work, my community, and those who are often overlooked has been vital. Creating a strong network of artists has become an essential and everyday activity with the help of the internet and social media, even in the context of COVID. I would not be where I am if I didn’t clearly state what I wanted to those who are gatekeepers, or simply a few more rungs higher than me on the ladder. I’m so thankful for those individuals who were willing to lift up my work.

There is no one formula for being successful, yet finding the time every day to make my work is my definition of success. If I can focus on this, and folks in the greater art community are kind of enough to invite me to show my work, give an artist talk, or teach a workshop, then I know I am on the right path. We are overextended as cultural workers, but we are finally understanding that this model cannot be sustainable. It inspires me to see folks actively create new opportunities, so that the emerging artist and the next generation do not have to jump through the same hoops as we did. Finally, I believe being easy to work with has allowed me to go a long way. This means being genuine in my pursuits and grateful for every opportunity.

FQ: This summer I was teaching a week-long intensive photography and digital-media workshop online, and a student confessed to me that they were so grateful to finally see another person of color as their teacher. The student was a young, gender-fluid Filipina who was at a top art school on the East Coast, and that reality is that their teachers did not look like them, and sadly were not able to see them and their work at eye level. These moments make my work worthwhile, with the difference between feeling seen as opposed to unseen is placed into motion, ultimately leading to a greater capacity for being an artist, cultural worker, or simply being able to make art.

FQ: I created my first light composition in 2012, around the same time I took my first digital-photography class. I began thinking about the roots of photography. When we break it down, photography simply translates to “drawing with light,” and my studies in art history led me to wanting to make a kind of photography that didn’t exist, consciously carving my own path. My experimental practice led me to developing this idiosyncratic language of image-making that blends drawing, painting, and photography. I use my camera like a brush, visually sampling streaks of light from the built environment, specifically in Los Angeles—car lights, street lights, neon, and more. Like a hip-hop beat, I sample light and the electric bodies that move through the Los Angeles night, arranging my kinetic photographs into densely rendered digital photo-montages, or light compositions.

At this point in time, there was virtually no one working with light painting within contemporary photography, so it became my mission to develop this process of experimental photography. From 2012 onward, I built a body of work from these compositions that explored themes of history, place, and migration. One of my most seminal works is A Repetition of Power, which I created around the 50th anniversary of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, and which displays the problematic reality of racial profiling that still exists for Black and brown youth.

My process for this work was essentially developed from scratch, building the composition from fragments of light. These compositions hold an elusive quality, where many find it hard to wrap their heads around how they were created. Each composition contains the movement and abstract essence of Los Angeles streets, as a reflection of lives lived, and my own process of looking for answers within the work. I’ve recently begun diving back into this style of work and exploring the possibility of animating my light compositions and bringing new life into older works. Each piece takes me months from start to finish and is definitely my ultimate labor of love.