Jaime Salvador Castillo & Michael Anthony García: whereABOUTS

whereABOUTS was an immersive art installation created by Castillo and García for UMOCA’s Art Truck. The project encouraged community members to investigate mapping as a visual tool for understanding, expressing and building relationships between place, identity and community. Utilizing the same name, this exhibition is a culmination of student artwork created over the past year at Art Truck visits to schools and community venues across the state of Utah.

In addition to providing opportunities for the Art Truck’s 10,000 visitors to explore their own neighborhoods through individual map-making, whereABOUTS integrated participants’ maps into the truck installation. As viewers used these maps to learn about experiences other than their own, whereABOUTS became a creative space for connecting diverse communities.

This museum exhibition in the final component of the whereABOUTS project. Castillo and García interpreted and reconfigured student maps, creating a new iteration of the work that emphasizes the ways in which youth navigate and find meaning in their communities.

About the Artists

Born in El Paso but raised in Austin, Michael Anthony García earned his BFA while attending Austin College in 1996. A multi-disciplinary artist, García focuses predominantly on found-object sculpture, installation, and performance art. García has also worked extensively as an independent curator, helping found the powerhouse Austin-based curatorial collective Los Outsiders, alongside Jaime Castillo and Hector Hernandez. A passionate creator, García has won multiple awards for both his curatorial and sculptural work, and has helped curate large-scale exhibitions for international artists.

Since earning his BFA from University of Texas – Austin in 2005, Jaime Salvador Castillo has become a prominent independent artist in the local Austin community. An independent curator, graphic artist, and the current Chair for the City of Austin’s Art in Public Places Panel, Jaime has worked extensively in helping spread artistic expression in Austin, serving on a variety of art boards, including being the chair of Generous Art’s Curatorial Board and an arts writer for The Austin Chronicle. Jaime’s most recent projects include “Eyes Got It,” an open art competition, and his work as part of the Los Outsiders Art Collective.

In 2007, both Michael García and Jaime Castillo, with Hector Hernandez, formed Los Outsiders, an artistic and curatorial collective based in Austin, Texas. After meeting at the Mexic-arte Museum’s Young Latino Artists exhibition in 2006, the trio sought to, according to García, “fuse Austin’s separate art cliques into one cohesive family.” (artsandculturetx) The art collective seeks to develop creative platforms and artistic dialog for local, national, and international artists. In 2012 and 2015, the collective was awarded Bes Group Show Curation by the Austin Critics’ Table. Central to the work of Los Outsiders is the idea of engaging with the community. When discussing their exhibition Gently Fried, García commentates, “We wanted to speak about ideas and issues that we saw encroaching on our community in Austin. We were thinking about gentrification, livability, cost of living, a rapidly vanishing community of color, opportunities for visual artists, and the city’s unprecedented and rapid growth. We came together to discuss artists that in some way speak to these issues” (MAG Web RE:SCULPT)