VCU’s arrival in the Final Four of the 2011 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament inspired many artful responses among the university’s student and alumni communities. For Roberto Jamora (BFA ’09), the competition was invigorating for an entirely different reason: the various formal elements used in tournament brackets, team colors, drills and court markings got him thinking about the intersection of sports and artmaking. As a result, his abstract paintings often leverage the same lines and two-dimensional shapes to explore processes of strategy, logic, history and the unscripted drama of the arts studio.
Jamora contrasts color fields and lively line work in expressive, almost dialogic compositions. In a new two-person exhibition at Topaz Arts, he presents paintings from “An Inventory of Traces,” a project he began this year. Inspired by Edward Said’s book Orientalism and bolstered by an Artist Community Engagement Grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Jamora transposes the stories of immigrant artists and writers into abstract works.
“Their stories,” he says, “inspired the color, composition, and literal traces on my paintings.”
Joan Carries All of This at the Women’s March (In Conversation with Joan Ariete-Hein) (36 x 44 inches, oil and beeswax on canvas, 2018) from the series “An Inventory of Traces.”
Community engagement has always been important to Jamora as an artist. While in the Painting + Printmaking program, he played in bands and started a gallery at his house in Oregon Hill. He likens Richmond’s affordability and close-knit community to a “utopia.” Together with his VCUarts education, he was able to find support in an experimental and DIY-friendly creative crowd.
“My time at VCUarts was really amazing,” says Jamora. “The art school really held us to high standards and made sure we were pushing the envelope in our projects and thinking critically with our material.”
Playoff Picture (17 x 11 inches, oil on two separate canvases over panel, 2018).
Today, Jamora lives in Queens with a studio in Brooklyn that he rents from fellow painting alumna Trudy Benson (BFA ’07). Since graduating, he’s earned an MFA in Visual Arts from Purchase College at the State University of New York, and has been an Emerging Artist-Teacher Fellow at the Joan Mitchell Foundation. In addition to the numerous national shows his work has appeared in, he has returned to Richmond with a 2017 solo exhibition at Shockoe Art Space and an anniversary show at ADA Gallery this May.
In August, his work will be included in “Constructing the Break” at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans.
“Marks and Conversations” at Topaz Arts runs through July 28. “Constructing the Break” opens August 4. For more about Roberto Jamora, visit his website or follow him on Instagram.
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