At 70, artist Jimmy Longoria still paints with ambition

CATHY WURZER: We're to learn something next. If you were to go into the offices and homes of US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, former US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Julian Castro, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, and actor and Chicano art collector Cheech Marin, you'd see a similar thread. They all contain art by Jimmy Longoria, a self-described Chicano street artist who has spent most of his career in Minnesota. I did not know that.

The Innovation Center at 3M even had him create art for their products, developed for window treatments, street signs, and the like. For our series "Connect the Dots," we're asking community elders to share part of their life story and some of the lessons they've learned along the way about what matters in life.

So we sent out MPR's senior economics contributor Chris Farrell to meet with Jimmy Longoria and his wife in their retirement community home in Oak Park Heights to do just that. I've been waiting to talk to you about this because you and I were talking off-air at Almanac about this, and it sounded so great. So welcome back.

CHRIS FARRELL: It's always great to be here.

CATHY WURZER: I have to say, I do not remember ever meeting Jimmy. So introduce us to Jimmy Longoria.

CHRIS FARRELL: So he's 70 years old and he's still painting his Chicano art with ambition and he's experimenting with different materials, compositions, and colors. And Cathy, I got to see his art studio. It's in the basement of his home. And I could see that he's working on several paintings. And I'm always interested in people's workspaces.

So he was born into an extended Tejano family on a small farm in South Texas. And not long after he was born, a sign went up in his small Texas town.

JIMMY LONGORIA: No, no. No Dogs, No Negroes, No Mexicans.

CATHY WURZER: Wow.

CHRIS FARRELL: Yikes. Exactly. So here's what's fascinating is the reaction of his extended family of farmers and entrepreneurs. They decided to raise him to become the first Tejano to governor of Texas with a goal of bringing about change for the better. And then when hard economic times in their Texas farming community pushed the family to move to Southern California, where they had relatives, the goal remained the same. But now the hope is that he would become the first Tejano governor of California.

CATHY WURZER: Wow. That's a lot of pressure to live with as a young person. Oh my gosh. So how did the switch come then from family political ambitions to becoming an artist?

CHRIS FARRELL: I know. So Cathy, as you know, most career shifts. The transition is a winding passage and there's always these few moments of serendipity. So long story short, he benefited from a series of well-funded programs for talented youth in California at the time.

He also had a group of high-level mentors, including Pat Brown, the former governor of California. The thing is he looked at the data, he looked at the trends, and he realized there wasn't going to be a Tejano governor of California in his lifetime.

CATHY WURZER: Well, right. At least so far.

CHRIS FARRELL: So he sat down with his mentors and he said he was going to take a different path.

JIMMY LONGORIA: And it was Pat Brown who said, well, if that's the case, what's the point? And I responded, exactly, sir. So what are you going to do? I said, I'm going to go in a different direction. What are you going to do? I don't know yet. And that's where I actually left school after the winter break and went up to the mountains and did one of those spiritual things.

CATHY WURZER: Yeah, I've actually done that myself. And we all wonder, what comes next? It's difficult, though. It can be a really difficult road.

CHRIS FARRELL: OK, so let's set the stage for this next chapter. Do you remember a series of books that was by Carlos Castaneda? The first was The Teachings of Don Juan.

CATHY WURZER: Oh, yeah. Yes.

CHRIS FARRELL: So they were very popular and they were also controversial. But it was about his training in shamanism, particularly with a group whose lineage descended from the Toltecs, a pre-Columbian Mesoamerican culture, which centered in Mexico. So Longoria's mom read them and she called him up while he was attending Claremont College.

JIMMY LONGORIA: She goes, no, no, you have to read it because it'll blow your mind. Read Don Juan, all the books about Don Juan, written by Castaneda. And it's all about the spiritual world and the resistance that goes on against it. And it fits right into that whole Chicano thing that says, we may have lost, we may have been occupied, we, the Indigenous people, but we have survived, even though we are interbred and we are culturally hybrid.

CHRIS FARRELL: OK, Cathy. So here's the unexpected twist of the story. Castaneda visit the area to give a series of talks, and Longoria got the job to drive him around for several days. And here's what happened at the end of the job.

JIMMY LONGORIA: As we get to the airport, he says, the answer to your question is yes. I didn't ask a question, not once. And I get him and he goes off to the airplane. And afterwards I go back to the colleges and I go, OK, wait a minute here. The answer to the question is yes. I got you.

And then I went back my group, and said, I think I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to go into being an artist and I'm going to create Chicano art. And the laughter in the room was deafening. It's like there's no such thing as Chicano art. I said, that is what makes it so viable. I get to be the guy that creates Chicano art.

CATHY WURZER: Oh my God, I love that story. So not easy to make a living as an artist, obviously. How did he make it work?

CHRIS FARRELL: So he worked first at retail companies, later at nonprofit organizations, and he would work long enough to make some money. Then he would quit and make art. And when the money ran out, the cycle started all over again.

JIMMY LONGORIA: I realized that the artist's life is feasible as basically following the formula of you work a regular job to be in the same real world, and then you buy yourself time to do important work. And then after a while, remember being raised on a farm, you work until the sun goes down. And then if you have some light and energy, you can keep working in a different form. So that was my formula.

CATHY WURZER: OK. I like the way he was really thoughtful and systematic in designing that.

CHRIS FARRELL: But here's the good news. The consulting gigs, there are in the past. He got a Bush Artist Fellowship in 2010 from the Bush Foundation, and since then he's made a living solely as an artist.

CATHY WURZER: Oh, that's cool. Did he have any advice for young folks starting out their careers, even if they're not artists?

CHRIS FARRELL: Yes. And it was a seemingly simple message. It was take the idea of your career and your ambitions seriously. Young adults, they start out their careers. They've been in school for a long time. And he wants them to learn from experience to find their direction.

Jimmy Longoria: Good to know that whatever the certificate, the diploma is, it's a ticket. What you have to check is the bust line exist. So that now when young people ask me for advice, I said, look, make sure you go back when you were a kid and make sure you had real experience.

In other words, it's your summer job, it's your after-hour job. It's the job you chose to help you get through college. So my advice nowadays to young people is make sure you know where you're going and make sure you get real experience in what you're doing.

CATHY WURZER: Oh, wow. I love listening to him because he loves, clearly, what he's doing as an artist.

CHRIS FARRELL: Yes, he does. And Cathy, at one point, there was a fascinating moment in our discussion and it focused on his drive to continue creating Chicano art, to accept the next challenge, to not rest on his laurels. And the spur to this part of the conversation was when I asked him what gives him meaning and purpose.

JIMMY LONGORIA: Change. The reality is this. We can't live our lives in a static moment. I'm not as nostalgic as other people. People think I'm kind of cold and ruthless because I just move on. It's the change. I mean, in this room, people have come in here and said, it looks like a museum. I go, no, it's a torture chamber because in here are the pieces that are the thing that I need to move from. It's pushing me forward to the next level. A farm teaches you that change is going to happen anyway. You might as well be part of the desirable change.

CATHY WURZER: OK, so here's the thing. It's a torture chamber. That's an interesting thing to say. So I'm assuming he's describing the paintings in his home art studio.

CHRIS FARRELL: In the living room where we were talking. And these paintings are beautiful. I mean, one was a traditional painting that he's well known for. It's a woman's head. It's in colors of red, yellow. There are these brushstrokes. But another was also a woman's head, but the colors were brighter. They were more vivid. And it was made with industrial materials like the orange and the collage. It was from a street sign material from 3M.

CATHY WURZER: So obviously, as he said, there are things in here that are the things that he needs to move from to something else. Interesting. Which is really a life lesson to move, keep moving, keep learning, embrace change, make a difference.

CHRIS FARRELL: That's right. And maintain the mission. And this is really important to him bringing Chicano art to the attention of more people. I mean, he now sells into a global marketplace, but he also wants Minnesota to honor Chicano art.

JIMMY LONGORIA: You see, Minnesota is full of nice people. And everybody's nice, and we have great institutions. But Minnesota nice racism is still there. It's in the air. And people sometimes can't help themselves. The MIA doesn't have a Chicano art collection. The Walker doesn't have a Chicano art collection. And everybody who calls themselves a Chicano, we're all reaching my age.

CATHY WURZER: So the Chicano artists of his generation are getting older.

CHRIS FARRELL: That's right. They are getting older. But there's also they have a lot to give, Cathy. And so one of the things that he said is that his grandmother gave him ambition, vision, the belief that things could get better. She thought he would head the governor said to the governor's office in Austin, and instead he became a Chicano artist. But there's a younger generation that needs encouragement that change can be for the better.

JIMMY LONGORIA: My responsibility to their parents is to encourage them to infuse them with vision. I mean, my grandmother, mijo, one day, you're going to go to Austin. You don't know where Austin is. I said, yes, I do, grandma. I got the map. OK, you're going to go there and you're going to paint those walls another color. I mean, way back. And that's part of the magic that Castaneda was talking about.

The energy of resistance, of thriving, of existence goes on. Like now whenever I'm introduced to the Latino community is the legend, Jimmy Longoria. I go like, wait, I ain't dead yet. And you can save that. But I already know that the real goal through the work that I leave behind is to keep the energy going forward.

CATHY WURZER: I love that. This was a great conversation, Chris Farrell. Thank you.

CHRIS FARRELL: Thanks a lot.

CATHY WURZER: Chris Farrell is MPR's senior economics contributor.