You've seen Luis Fitch's art on stamps, at Target and on the street. Now, see it in a gallery.

The Mexican-Minnesotan artist, who has helped define the Twin Cities' visual language, has a solo show at Bloomington Center for the Arts.

By Jenna Ross Star Tribune

July 11, 2024 — 7:00am

The paintings were finished, the book was published, the prints were packed. But Luis Fitch was still in his backyard studio, fussing over details. On this night, a week before opening his solo show at Bloomington Center for the Arts, over wall labels.

He held up a piece of clear acrylic, cracked in one corner.

"I got these little gold nails and was testing them, but it breaks," Fitch said, peering through. "And I had a feeling that was going to happen. So I need to go and buy a drill."

At the Walker Art Center, Fitch noted, such things would be handled by a team of staff members. But the Mexican artist is managing every detail of the exhibition, which surveys a decade of his colorful, graphic work. He curated the artworks, placing tiny versions of them in a 3-D model he made of the gallery. His agency, UNO Branding, did the layout and publication of the accompanying 432-page book. Then, days before the show's opening, he painted a wall bright pink.

"I wanted to elevate it," he said, "because I think the community deserves that."

Fitch's focus on community is why his exhibition features three free bilingual art workshops. Why his book is made with inexpensive materials. Why, rather than posturing his artwork for wealthy collectors, he drops off stacks of free prints, with certificates of authenticity, in Latino neighborhoods.

"There is no better gallery than the street," the 58-year-old said.

Fitch has painted and printed, branded and rebranded, until his skeletons, birds and pops of pink have become part of the Twin Cities' visual language. You might have encountered his posters on a street corner or his artworks at a restaurant, his Día de los Muertos stamps at the post office or his products at Target. Last year, he led the state as it overhauled its flag, combing through some 2,000 submissions and myriad political pressures to arrive at the final, modern design.

"He's very malleable and very versatile," said longtime friend and fellow artist Xavier Tavera. "He can be doing graffiti in the street or he can be doing something that could hang in someone's living room or something that is super-conceptual that is going to go into a museum."

One Cinco de Mayo many years ago, Fitch invited community members to paint a drop float, Tavera said. Fitch observed, quietly, as for hours, people signed and sketched and filled the canvas with clashing colors. "It's looking really bad, very ugly. And we're like, what are we going to do with this thing?" Tavera said, chuckling. "He stands up, grabs a can of paint and a brush, and uses all that madness as a backdrop and starts painting over it."

A portrait, outlined in black. "Something very cool comes out it," Tavera said.

'A starting point'

In a parking lot across from the Minneapolis Institute of Art two weeks ago, a dozen people watched as Fitch grabbed a stencil and a can of yellow spray paint. He stuck the stencil to his canvas, which was already filled with paper and color and paint. Pffffff.

In the eye socket of a skull, a yellow flower bloomed. The group gave a collective "Ahhhhh."

"If you're done with your stencil," he said, kneeling in the grass, "what can we do with it?"

"Wheat paste it!" a woman in her 60s shouted. He laughed and nodded. "That's right. And what is that called?" he asked the group.

"Retiring!" another woman said.

"Yes!" he said, waving his arms in triumph.

His class had caught on. For weeks, Fitch had been leading a group of older adults in a Vitality Arts Workshop at Mia. First, he shared the history of graffiti and street art. But very quickly, he got paint on their hands.

His hands, too.

"He gets right in there with them, mixing up the wheat paste," said Julie Bourman, the museum's vitality arts coordinator. The workshop filled quickly, Bourman said, with artists, retired teachers and "Luis fans."

Much of Fitch's imagery — his skulls and flowers, birds and butterflies — begins with paper cutting, a folk art tradition known as papel picado. (He often digitizes the designs, making their edges sharper and cleaner.) As part of his solo show, he'll be leading papel picado workshops. All you need to make art, he often emphasizes, is scissors and paper.

"I want people to see that anybody can do this," Fitch said. "It's a starting point."

As a middle school kid in Tijuana, Mexico, José Luis Fitch Jiménez was fascinated by posters, by stamps, by the art books that the neighborhood librarians set aside for him.

To create his first painting, he bought a model airplane kit solely for the little paint set that accompanied it. His early works — some of which he kept, some he recently bought back — grapple with the same issues he's addressing today. In one, a protester, surrounded by bright blue, waves a fist at a figure with a rifle. Behind him, the words, scrawled like graffiti: ¿Por qué?

Later, Fitch was inspired by the work and ethos of Keith Haring, who he met a couple of times, while living in New York and while studying at ArtCenter College of Design in California, where Haring painted a large mural, one of his last.

Like Haring, Fitch believes in putting art where people live. "I decided that the street was going to be my gallery."

So in his new gallery show, presented by Artistry Theater and Visual Arts, a collection of photographs places his works in their original context: posted or wheat-pasted onto utility boxes and fences, windows and walls.

One image shows a billboard posted at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue S., where, in 2020, a police officer murdered George Floyd. "RACISM KILLS," the billboard reads. The same pink backdrop, the same skull. But this time, the skull lay on its side. In the eye sockets, large X's.

Falling from them, red tears.

A dream realized

Most days, Fitch wears the same thing: Black Adidas sneakers, black jeans and a dark gray T-shirt. The outside of his Minneapolis home and studio, too, are matte charcoal.

But that backyard studio is bursting with color. Turquoise, pink and yellow — but also earthier pigments he grinds himself.

Growing up, Fitch was always moving from apartment to apartment, with no place to work. He saw movies about Jackson Pollock and fantasized about a place where he could throw paint. So this space, which he had built amid the pandemic, was a dream realized.

Fitch often works on three, four, five canvases at once, spreading them across long tables. One canvas talks to the next. A new project is always in conversation with the past one.

He's a self-described workaholic, but believes, à la Pablo Picasso, that you have to be working all the time in order to grab inspiration when it comes. "Some people have a real life, like they spend time playing tennis or whatever. Not me," Fitch said. He's either project-managing or art-directing or making art himself.

Or he's heading the State Emblems Redesign Commission, a gig he took because "this state has given me so much, so this was one way of me giving back to the citizens." (That role is one reason why, on Friday, Mexico's Ministry of Foreign Affairs will present him with the Mexicanos Distinguidos award, an annual recognition given to Mexican nationals living outside the country.)

He was knocked sideways by the politics of that closely watched, hotly debated state flag selection process. On the final day, Fitch told people, "Enough."

"I said, 'Today I'm switching to be a designer. That was the reason you all voted for me — to be a designer and a consultant. And I'm not doing politics.'"

When he was younger, he often "over-strategized" his fine art, thinking two steps beyond the making. But now, the blending between his work, his design and his artmaking feels organic, authentic. He brings his full identity to each thing.

"Design and branding and art," he said, "they are all fused together for me."

Behind works wrapped in plastic and ready for the show were four new paintings. Like many of the decade's worth of artworks in his solo exhibition, they featured skeletons. But unlike those works, with their sharp, clean lines, these paintings highlight the hand that made them.

Drips of color. Dots of different sizes. Eyes wild with energetic brushstrokes. Average people made royal by the crowns Fitch painted atop their skulls.