Word: ferrer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...repeated inside the magazine, for example. Still, the magazine's diversity of sources and subjects should encourage a proud sense of unity in the nation's often peckishly insular Hispanic factions. "It will help Latinos realize how much they have in common," says Co-Managing Editor Jose Ferrer, "their roots, achievements and problems." Adds Publisher Lopez: "Nuestro will reflect a viable culture in which God is not a joke, in which families have meaning and strength, in which the heart holds as much essential information as the head...
...wiry, intense man with a head like a parchment-covered cannon ball and a passion for skin diving, Ferrer was born in Santurce, P.R., in 1933. In New York City in his early twenties, he supported himself as a drummer with bands in Spanish Harlem. Cuban music, he recalls, gave him "the ability to bring out the tropical, primitive, emotional conditions of one's roots into the open, and to rejoice in their messiness and to be ... proud of their contradictions...
...Ferrer's breakthrough did not come until the late '60s, but then there was no restraining him. He turned into a passionately regional artist: "I saw the North American Giant as tired, bleeding from excesses which were never meant to produce pleasures except perhaps those of a puritanical order, foreign and strange...
...pleasures of Ferrer's new work are by no means puritanical. They are florid souvenirs de voyage -in some cases, of an imaginary Africa-in the form of tents. The tents are not habitable. One, entitled Sudan, has no entrance; the gloomy space inside is occupied by a stuffed toucan on a perch, eerie blue in the half-light. The accessible space in Sahara, for all the breadth of the piece, is a small womblike pocket. La Luna and Asia Solo can not be entered at all. They are not so much environments, therefore, as three-dimensional paintings...
...these tents, over plains and dunes, had gaudily stained the canvas with memory; the fabric develops what it wit nessed, like a Polaroid photo. They also suggest sideshow tents - bright, tacky signs advertising freaks and marvels. As the British Empire's cartographers once colored half the world red, Ferrer is busy coloring it Puerto Rican, smeared with acid-drop colors, scrawled with looping graffiti. There are few artists of this energy at work today...