ART- By Jamie Chihuan - 10 Feburary 2022
This weekend I had the pleasure of interviewing Kimberly Gutierrez and gathering her experiences as an artist here in Denver. We met at Kimberly's apartment in south Denver. Kimberly is currently the graphic designer and marketing assistant for the Museo de Las Americas. This is how we were introduced to one another since we both are in-house artists at the Museo. I did not expect myself to relate to Kimberly any the way I did after the interview. We went into this conversation unfamiliar with each other's past but throughout the course of the interview, I found my experiences as a Latino artist, while not entirely the same are very similar.
I have had a few brief conversations with Kimberly beforehand just through the Museo de Las Americas. Going into this interview I did not know what to expect. I began to ask Kimberly basic questions just to get to know her. She is from El Paso, Texas, and recently moved to Denver in 2017. During her childhood, her family moved to Juarez where she stayed for 10 years and I found her experiences very interesting. Kimberely recalls going to school growing up. "We had to cross every day, just to get to school because my parents wanted me to go to school in Texas" Kimberly Said. Kimberly's experience of making sure she was receiving an American education surprised me. We both found that we shared similarities feeling stuck in between cultures of being American and Hispanic. Kimberly came to Colorado and began to finish her bachelors in graphic design at Regis University.
Kimberly shared some of the worst and best things that happened to her while she was attending. She had plenty of great things to say about her former professor and mentor Tony Ortega. "I was able to find people at Regis like Tony Ortega, who has introduced me to a whole bunch of other artists and communities that were I feel like I fit in" Kimberly says. She was also happy to have found a passion in astrology and learning to mix the two studies together. I found this insightful to my current experience at CU Boulder. I often find myself alone, mourning for a sense of community and Kimberly had the same experience. Our first generation and Latin backgrounds made it hard for us to fit in but where we did was in the class room.
"I was kind of like jumping around from place to place to live, because I was trying to get a dorm room there. And they kind of just told me like, well, you're an upperclassman, we don't have anything for you." Kimberly recalls her worst experience at metro. While she might've found friendship in the class room Kimberley still felt like adminstairon let her down. At this point I was relating to Kimberely more than I would have ever expected. She left me wondering what it means to be a latino artist and the labels that are often placed on us. Kimberly doesn't want latino arts to be a gimmick of frida kahlo style but an expressive form of conveying our experiences as latinos to the world.