From exhibition to his memorial

An exhibition originally intended to trumpet the Los Angeles return of artist Emilio Cruz is now serving as a memorial, after Cruz died earlier this month.

On Dec. 10, about three weeks before the scheduled closing of his show of drawings and paintings at the Alitash Kebede Gallery on La Brea Avenue, Cruz succumbed to pancreatic cancer, diagnosed one week earlier.

The 66-year-old African American artist, who lived and worked in New York City, had exhibited in Los Angeles previously at the Adler Gallery and at UCLA, but this represents his first one-man show here.

“Emilio had been complaining of stomach trouble at the opening on Sept. 25,” gallery proprietor Alitash Kebede says. “We were all very excited about Emilio’s exhibition and were shocked and deeply saddened when he passed away so suddenly. But we’re also glad we are able to have his show, of which he was very proud.”

Kebede and Jeffery Landau of Landau Traveling Exhibitions had worked intimately with Cruz in putting together the show. They say that in due time they will try to place Cruz’s art in prominent contemporary American art museums and collections.

“There are 40 drawings in this show from Emilio’s ‘I Am Food I Eat the Eater of Food’ series,” Kebede says. (The title comes from the ancient Hindu philosophical text known as the Upanishads.) “Because of Emilio’s passing, and following the wishes of his wife, Patricia Cruz, we’ve made the decision not to sell any of these drawings individually but will look for a museum or institution that will keep them together as a group.”

Cruz’s drawings present often tense, dramatic and disturbing scenes that lambaste and satirize society’s cruelty and narrow-minded hypocrisy. Populated with disembodied human heads, bats, rats, rabbits, mythic beasts, archeological fragments and a host of other wildly imagined phantasmagoria, Cruz’s works feature protean players that cause all kinds of allegorical mischief.

In one playfully titled work, “Mice Scrutinizing Art and Culture,” three serious-looking vermin contemplate a row of recognizable historical paintings hung on a gallery wall. However, one picture presents the conspicuously out-of-context portrait of a mouse. As the viewing mouse becomes the viewed one in this piece, Cruz raises the issue of America’s tenuous sense of privacy today.

In another work, the large oil painting “Equestrian,” an androgynous figure with a white horse’s head rides a naked and kneeling black man. Beyond its condemnation of racism and imperialism, the painting also speaks of the unconscious’ power over thoughts and actions.

The New York-born and -bred Cruz came onto the Manhattan art scene of the 1960s with figurative work that harnessed the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic of fierce inventiveness as well as a quest for self-knowledge and redemption through art making. Even more broadly, he counted Goya, Durer, Rembrandt, Bosch, Picasso, Garcia Marquez, Jung and Pablo Neruda among his influences.

Cruz exhibited at New York galleries such as Virginia Zabriskie’s and Martha Jackson’s and, in the 1970s, taught at the Art Institute of Chicago before returning to New York City in 1982.

In addition to painting and drawing, Cruz was a poet, novelist, jazz drummer, performance artist and playwright. In 1981, Jean Erdman and Joseph Campbell produced two of his plays, “Homeostasis: Once More the Scorpion” and “The Absence Held Fast to Its Presence,” at the Open Eye Theater in New York City. The plays later toured in France and Italy.

As for the current exhibition of Cruz’s art in L.A., Kebede says the show was originally slated to close Dec. 4 but was extended to the end of the month before Cruz’s medical condition was known.

Upon his death, the organizers further extended the show to the end of January.

“It was a joy and honor to be able to work with an artist and thinker of Emilio’s caliber,” Landau says. “He was a true maestro.”

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Emilio Cruz

Where: Alitash Kebede Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., L.A.

When: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays

Ends: Jan. 29

Contact: (323) 549-0003; alitashkgallery.com