PILSEN — Chicago muralist Ray Patlán, whose artwork has adorned Pilsen’s walls and buildings for decades, died last week at 77.
Born in 1946 at Mother Cabrini Memorial Hospital on the West Side, Patlán grew up in Pilsen with his parents, who immigrated to the United States from Guanajuato, Mexico, and his four sisters.
While Patlán left Chicago for Oakland in 1975 to teach art at the University of California at Berkeley, he regularly returned to the city for visits and art projects, friends said.
“He was a pioneer,” said Robert Valadez, 61, a fellow muralist and longtime collaborator. “By the time I started being active in the mural movement, guys like Ray [Patlán] had already gotten the ball rolling. So when I got started in the ’80s, it was already an active scene.”
‘A Man Of Conviction’
Patlán was a trailblazer within the Chicano art community, known for uplifting Mexican-American culture through his work. He trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico, according to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Patlán started painting murals after serving in the Vietnam War. He worked on his first public art installation in the 1970s at the former Casa Aztlán community center, 1831 S. Racine Ave., which he called his “second home.” He had been going there since he was 10, he said.
The Casa Aztlán mural — like much of Patlán’s work — was a tribute to his Mexican heritage, Chicano figures and his neighborhood. It became a Pilsen landmark and was heralded a masterpiece within the Chicano art movement, neighbors said.
Pilsen native Steve Vidal said he was always captivated by the artwork that covered Casa Aztlán’s walls. For more than two decades, Vidal has taught visual arts at Benito Juarez High School, where Patlán’s work is on display among other murals.
“I grew up around the neighborhood, and there was always art,” Vidal, 52, said. “I was captivated by the lettering that was part of the gang subculture, the cursive writing, the old English letters. There’s always this very strong connection to color, to symbols … I didn’t really understand, but nevertheless, it just captivated my senses. And as I got older and went to school to study art, I began to appreciate the value of having art in our community.”
To Vidal, Patlán “forever will be an OG” Pilsen artist.
“I have nothing but respect for the man,” Vidal said. “I’ll always remember his genuine, down-to-earth persona. He’s just a beautiful soul.”
Vidal, who met Patlán during a 2017 youth art show in Pilsen, said the late artist was “first and foremost an activist” involved with the Brown Berets Chicano movement.
“He was a man of conviction,” Vidal said. “He was unapologetic as a Chicano and was a staunch advocate of standing up for the community. He embodied the spirit of collaboration and of collective work.”
Patlán often involved neighbors and fellow artists in his work, friends said. When Casa Aztlán’s iconic facade was painted over in 2017, sparking outrage among neighbors, Patlán was invited back to Chicago to paint it again, and he stuck to that collaborative philosophy.
Patlán knew how much the mural meant to the community and how he and young Pilsen neighbors “worked like hell” to paint it decades earlier. Whether he painted a new mural or a recreation of the original was entirely up to the community, the artist told DNAinfo at the time.
“I knew the community was not going to be happy about it — that place is like an institution in the community,” Patlán said. “At the same time, I realize that everything changes. But I’m glad the community took up the struggle.”
The restoration of Casa Aztlán was the third and final time Valadez collaborated with Patlán on a mural, Valadez said.
Valadez met Patlán in 1987. Their first collaboration was a mural at Benito Juarez High School, from which Valadez had graduated six years earlier. The two of them and a handful of other artists were commissioned by the local chamber, Valadez said.
“They invited Ray [Patlán] to participate because he was an old-school Pilsen mural painter,” Valadez said. “By that time, he had already moved to California. But they invited him to come back and to paint. That was the first time Ray [Patlán] and I worked together.”
It was an honor because “everybody would talk about [Patlán] and how important he was,” Valadez said.
The duo later worked on the restoration of Patlán’s controversial “History of the Mexican American Worker” mural in Blue Island, which depicted a symbol of the United Farm Workers and sparked a legal battle with the city.
“They were painting a Mexican-American-themed mural related to the farm workers and their logo,” Valadez said. “The city leadership came by and said, ‘Oh, you can’t paint that. That’s advertising.'”
When Patlán and the artists sued the city in response, they went all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court and won, setting a precedent for public art, Valadez said.
“They were allowed to finish the mural,” Valadez said.
Valadez also helped Patlán restore the Casa Aztlán mural in 2017.
“We really bonded as artists because we sort of shared a certain philosophy of public art and mural painting, and how it’s important in terms of imparting cultural and political ideas to the public,” Valadez said.
‘He Wanted To Paint And … Share It’
For Patlán, murals were more than just a means of self-expression. Art was “a way to motivate the community and to create a dialogue and communicate with them,” Valadez said.
“He was a veteran and he came back … and decided to dedicate himself to painting in the neighborhood,” Valadez said. “He set the pattern for the rest of us to emulate, not only being a creative or an artist but the idea of having a certain sense of responsibility to one’s community and to one’s people … I took inspiration from his early work and incorporated it in my own work. And to this day it’s something that’s important to me.”
Valadez grew up hearing about Patlán before meeting and working with him — and subsequently discovered his “mercurial, passionate” demeanor, he said.
“He lived life fully … and he took what he did seriously,” Valadez said.
But Valadez isn’t sure Patlán realized just how impactful his work was to neighbors in Pilsen and beyond.
“When you’re doing these things, you don’t think about what you’re doing in historical terms. It’s just what you do,” Valadez said. “He was the same way. He just felt that he was a working artist and he wanted to paint and he wanted to share it with the community and so on. I followed in that same pattern, in his footsteps.”
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