FELIX QUINTANA // Cruising Below Sunset
June 4th - July 16th, 2022
Cruising Below Sunset documents Quintana’s movement across space and time with the places that have shaped his work and life, including Los Angeles, San Jose, and his parents' home country of El Salvador. Cruising Below Sunset is a re-imagining of home, collective memory, and place through Quintana’s experience as a first generation Salvadoran- American from Los Angeles. Featuring new work created during the pandemic, Quintana intrinsically explores analog and digital photography, collage, and sculptural installation processes as well as
looking at the street as a site for artistic activism, intervention and critique. Through different threads of this new body of work, Quintana views his hometown Los Angeles being reclaimed and reimagined as a site of survivance for Black, brown, immigrant, working class people, and all those who are pushing against the realities of gentrification, mass media narratives, and corporate surveillance. Cruising Below Sunset seeks to empower the narrative of migration, movement, and mobility of the Black and Brown diaspora in Los Angeles, for the purpose of elevating one another, and underscoring our futurity through a reimagining of the past and present moment.
AN ESSAY FOR CRUISING BELOW SUNSET BY Javier Arellano Vences
In Cruising Below Sunset, artist Felix Quintana engages with the historical documentation and mapping of migrant communities across Los Angeles County, adjacent unincorporated neighborhoods, and the City of San Jose. Quintana employs a mixture of digital and analog photographic processes, sculpture, collage, and installation to reflect on everyday cruisers (i.e., working-class people on the move) impacted by the regulation and surveillance of human mobility, migration, and displacement. The exhibition’s title, Cruising Below Sunset, is polyvalent in meaning. It is a nod to Ed Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), an accordion artist book that included photographs of the 1.5-mile section of Sunset Boulevard, and his documentation of much of the boulevard’s longer 21-mile stretch from Pacific Palisades to Downtown Los Angeles. Like Ruscha, Quintana utilizes photography as a form for conceptual topographical studies that often capture the ever-shifting landscape of Los Angeles. However, Cruising Below Sunset situates the numerous communities that reside south of Sunset Boulevard, such as Inglewood, Lynwood, Compton, South Central, MacArthur Park, Pico Union, Westlake, Watts, and East Los Angeles—where Sunset turns into Avenida Cesar E. Chavez (formerly Brooklyn Avenue until 1994) and just a few blocks from where Ruscha stopped documenting the street. Quintana’s title also invokes the golden hour, a time just before sunset that photographers favor for its lighting and when car club enthusiasts roll out onto the streets to cruise and entertain their Black and Brown onlookers. 
Showcased in Cruising Below Sunset is Quintana’s Los Angeles Blueprints (2019-Present), a series of reworked Google Street View images that capture pedestrians in working-class communities. Street View, a navigation tool, favors roads and architecture while rendering pedestrians indifferent. So, the original Street View images unintentionally recorded everyday intimate moments in public, such as mothers walking their children, cyclists strolling through the neighborhood, and students conversing. In Los Angeles Blueprints, Quintana reintroduces a sense of dignity and agency to these subjects through a combination of formal strategies. He converts the digital Street View images into cyanotypes, an early photographic process that produces blueprints using coated paper and light. This technical move from digital photography to an early manual photographic process foregrounds the intimacy that the Street View format impedes by expanding the processing time of each image, disrupting the reproductive immediacy of digital images, and introducing contemplative, monochromatic, serene blue hues. Additionally, Quintana crops the images and integrates etchings of vernacular iconography associated with the Los Angeles landscape, such as vegetation blooming from concrete, glyphs of roaming street coyotes, and drive-through business signage. Quintana also etches short poetic text, stylized as graffiti, to accentuate local aesthetics and sensibilities and reflect the ever-present grace and hardship of these communities. Cruising Below Sunset juxtaposes the cyanotypes with a new series of collages and sculptures from Quintana’s family archive and miscellanea sourced from mobile marketplaces, such as swap meets and street vendors. These works playfully chart points of connection between distant locales dear to Quintana, including greater Los Angeles County, which he calls home; his mother’s hometown in Ahuachapan, El Salvador, which he frequented during summers as a child; and San Jose, California, the site where he earned his MFA and mentored Black and Brown youth as an arts educator. An extension of the artist’s body and the lived experiences he shares with others, Quintana reframes the presentation of youth from these multiple locales and periods to elevate and reimagine them in extraordinary ways and with a sense of pride and honor. This exhibition is a tribute to the resilient and contemplative youth, the younger self, and the families that find ingenious ways to carve homes across the lands they traverse despite distance and separation. This one's for you; keep it moving... 
Javier Arellano Vences
Ph.D. student in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University.
Installation Images
Installation Images by Elon Schoenholz
About the Artist
Felix Quintana
Felix Quintana is a visual artist, educator, and first generation Salvadoran from Los Angeles. His multidisciplinary process spans drawing, photography, collage, digital media, writing, and teaching artistry. His practice examines place, memory, and the street as a site for artistic activism, intervention, and critique. Born in Lynwood, CA in 1991, Quintana received an MFA in Photography from San Jose State University and a BA in Studio Art from Cal Poly Humboldt. Solo exhibitions include SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco, CA; Espacio 1839, Boyle Heights, CA; and Residency Art Gallery, Inglewood, CA. Select group exhibitions include LAXART, Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, Museum of Latin American Art Long Beach, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco State University Art Gallery, NIAD Art Center, among many others. His work has been published in NPR, LA Times, The Guardian, Totem Magazine, ArtNews, and more. He has lectured at UCLA and served as a teaching artist at the Hammer Museum, artworxLA, Slanguage Studio, Plaza de La Raza, Southern Exposure, and more. Quintana has been an artist in residence at MACLA, Working Partnerships USA, and Meta Open Arts in the Bay Area. He currently lives, works, and teaches in Los Angeles, CA.
