This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2003, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Some days, artist Ruby Chacon thinks about leaving Utah. She admits she is never really serious about it. But here, in the place where she was born, it's hard to make it as an artist, especially as a painter whose subject matter isn't the typical Utah landscape,
The subject of her art comes from her world, one not often represented in most images about the Beehive State, Chacon says.
But just because it doesn't reflect a mainstream image doesn't mean it isn't Utah art, she argues.
"Paint what you know," Chacon says between sips of iced chai.
Across the street, her paintings of a Mexican woman cooking, an American Indian dancer in motion and a Polynesian girl brighten up an empty building on the 200 South block of Salt Lake City's Main Street.
When she was a girl in the city's public schools and then an art student at the University of Utah, she never saw paintings like that, with bright reds, oranges and yellows, or with people from various ethnic backgrounds.
Mainstream Utah art tends to be about landscapes with subtle earthy tones, says Pam O'Mara of the UTah Artist Hands gallery in downtown Salt Lake, which exhibits Chacon's work.
"We're kind of reserved," she says. "Going with really bold colors is something that doesn't appeal to everybody in Utah. And she tends to paint big, this tiny girl."
Teachers taught Chacon, now 32, to draw lines and circles. Her surroundings taught her to become an artist.
"It would be a tragedy if I didn't do what I do," says the wispy Chacon in a voice that is gentle but strong.
She began her career as an artist by drawing her family. She drew her mother cooking. She drew her grandfather herding sheep. She drew her family in charcoal black, yellows, and reds, gathering around food.
"Even my colors aren't mainstream," she says.
Her hot reds, yellows and browns are similar to those in Latin American art.
"Her color choices and her canvases are big," O'Mara says. "For the most part, they tend to take up a wall space, but they're wonderful."
The philosophy behind her paintings is to draw mostly Mexican or Chicano subjects like her family in commonplace activities, to show non-Caucasians living a quotidian life.
"I want to show images that portray my experience and the Latino experience of living in Utah," she says.
Latino life in Utah doesn't mean committing crimes or being invisible in an predominantly white society, she says. The way she sees it, Utahns get a skewed reality of nonwhite Utah from television and print media.
"In every society, there's horrific images and then there's beauty, there's tragedies and there's horrors but there's beauty," she says.
The media are there for the tragedy, but rarely there to testify to the successes or normal lives of nonwhite communities, she says.
She acknowledges that the aftermath of the 1996 murder of her 3-year-old nephew, Orlando Chacon, by her sister's boyfriend influences her views. When the family tragedy played out on television and newspapers, her sister was portrayed as someone who defended the murderer of her child, which was untrue, Chacon says. But the worst part was that the news media never humanized her little nephew.
"That's what changed me and my artwork," she says.
While the news media focused on the tragedy, Chacon began focusing on the good things the family represented.
She painted members of her family working, she painted them cooking and she painted them enjoying life.
"I was so tired of people that I loved and their images and stories being tainted," she said. "It feels like I'm the vehicle to express their voices."
But expressing those voices comes with a price.
During her early years in the art business, Chacon took temporary office jobs, typing, being a receptionist, conducting surveys, anything that would pay the bills. The rest of the time she continued painting in addition to mothering her son Orion.
"I was offered full-time jobs but I didn't want to take them," she recalls.
If she took a full-time job that didn't involve art, she would give up the only skill she had -- and, worse, give up on portraying lives that most Utahns never saw.
"I wanted people to see connections between families," she says. "I wanted them to see that we're not as different. And we all have tragedies but we all have beautiful things in life."
And she believes she may have succeeded. Though she doesn't enjoy the commercial and financial success she would like, she sells enough paintings to keep her in the profession full time.
"There are people who appreciate it," O'Mara says of Chacon's work. "Her work took my breath away."
Her work may not be revolutionizing Utah art, but it has been noticed, O'Mara said. Chacon has found supporters in the community, including Nell and Rocky Raymond, owners of Display Business Inc., which does large-format printing and reprints of art in downtown Salt Lake City.
"It was refreshing to see an artist who creates such emotion and brings such rich culture and her family's roots in Utah," Nell Raymond said. "Most people think of Utah as the Mormons arriving. They don't think of Utah as being part of Mexico and the Mexican culture that was here long before. You bet it's Utah art."
But she sees Chacon's point. Raymond recalls two Latin American sculptors whose work she liked. They left the state because they felt they could not thrive in Utah.
Chacon says it is sometimes a struggle to remain in Utah.
"There's so many times that I want to follow my friends," she says, looking across the street at her paintings and mentioning that California and Texas have large Latino communities where her type of work is seen as mainstream.
"But here, I feel like I have to work hard to get accepted," she says. "And I'm here to change what's accepted, not just in my work, but in art."
Joshua Brown/The Salt Lake Tribune