Dixie Salazar
California artist Dixie Salazar was born in Chicago, Illinois and studied art at California State University, Fresno. Also an author, activist, and educator, she has been a working artist and writer for more than forty years. Her work has been described as rich in the color and iconography of her Spanish heritage, with a passion for life. Her paintings are a combination of flowing forms, vivid color, and strong design elements, often imbued with mystery and ambiguity. Her work sometimes accesses found objects and appropriated images from old advertisements, coloring books and other historical sources.
Salazar works in many media including oil painting, acrylics, watercolor, collage, and photography. Her work has been shown extensively on the West Coast, including exhibits in San Francisco, Sacramento, Las Vegas, New York, the Merced Multicultural Art Museum, Arte Americas, Fresno, The Fresno Art Museum and Fresno City Hall.
Dixie is a successful poet and published author, publishing her first novel, LIMBO in 1995, and three volumes of poetry, HOTEL FRESNO, REINCARNATION OF THE COMMONPLACE, and BLOOD MYSTERIES by University of Arizona Press. Her volume of poetry, FLAMENCO HIPS AND RED MUD FEET was published by University of Arizona Press in 2010. ALTAR FOR ESCAPED VOICES is now available from Tebot Bach. Her newest novel is a young adult fantasy titled CARMEN AND CHIA MIX MAGIC. All titles are available on Amazon.com.
Her recent projects include a photographic exhibit of a homeless encampment in Fresno and serving on the board of the Eco Village Project and the Dakota Eco Garden, which provide sustainable, green housing for the homeless in a community environment. She’s also active in Fresno Filmworks. Some of Dixie’s awards include a Horizon Award and Award of Excellence from the National Women’s Political Caucus. Her work was chosen in a very competitive bidding process to be included in Renaissance Housing Project for the homeless, sponsored by the Fresno Housing Authority in 2012. In 2014, Dixie’s work won Best of Show and a First and Second place in the Fresno Arts Council Juried Show. In the Sierra Art Trails juried show, she also won Best of Show in 2014.
In 2017, Dixie’s work will be featured in a one-woman show at the Monterrey Peninsula College Art Gallery. I have considered myself an artist since I was about three years old. Through many years of struggle as a working mother, tied to a mind-numbing job, I always made artwork. It was my refuge and the silent mate who always got me and will eventually be the repository of the difficulties that shaped me. My work explores female identity as well as mixed heritage (Anglo and Latina).
Underlying dialogues mix with elements of religion, at times iconoclastic, at times questioning. Utilizing everyday objects and popular culture icons, affect images and archetypal symbols creates a self-made mythos that relates to my personal life but also resonates with universal concerns. I like juxtaposing mysterious elements like the red chair, the luchador and the window which pays homage to Pierre Bonnard. Other works play with reality versus illusion, central to figurative, if not all painting, also part of a series, with postmodernist tendencies delving into the artist’s role in society and relationship to the world, the ups and downs of creation, and the many ways the artist discovers new worlds within themselves. Artists, by the act of creation attempt to defy death and reorder their own sense of reality. The Red Line Series explores the fine and at times fragile line between life and death.
In a large body of work exhibited at Artes Americas in 2011, I studied Mesoamerican cultures and became fascinated with the Mayan and Aztec and their connection to nature. I became aware of a sense of diaspora within myself related to what I perceived as a crisis of contemporary life, all of us caught together in a world of plastic and decaying commodities, far from our indigenous homelands. These so-called primitive works stirred something in the recesses of my soul, reconnecting me to the stars and the jaguar and the sea. Concern for the environment and for the quality of life in contemporary times blended with a distinctly Mayan influence in the show titled “Interconnections”.
I also attempt to access the subconscious and hidden interior worlds of the psyche. I’m interested in the leaps of perception that occur when disparate images are juxtaposed, releasing a synergy of metaphor and meaning far beyond the images by themselves. My work as an art therapist has given me ample opportunities to explore Jungian ideas and embrace the shadow side within the human psyche and also to value the process as much as the product. I try to incorporate humor as a most useful tool to defuse the terror and chaos within these discoveries.
Found images continue to play an important role in my work. In a large body of work titled “Imagining Water”, an American Red Cross water safety manual inspired fifteen large 42” X 60” paintings of the figure submerged. The figures, free of the influence of gravity appear in half ballet/ half struggle positions and work as a metaphor for the human condition, with associations of birth, baptism, death, drowning, survival and spirituality floating below the surface. I began as a watercolorist and learned about mixing and 
layering color, about utilizing negative space and spontaneity and learned to recognize the beauty of accidents as part of the process and to incorporate them into the final product.
My newest work falls into two bodies: oil pastel/mixed media (small drawings that attempt to navigate between painting and drawing). Also, I continue my exploration of what I call the painted collage, starting with a chaotic layer of collage and using oils, pastels and even watercolors to bring order to a disconnected world. Charlie Parker said, “If it’s not in your life, it won’t come out your horn.” I look forward to continuing my work with the homeless and in social justice areas, confident that these and other passions will flow from my paint brush.
