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Aviva's Picks
Aviva Lehmann | Senior Vice President, American Art
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This vivid colored pencil portrait by Lucinda Hinojos (La
Morena) celebrates the Chicana spirit—bridging cultural pride
and feminine power. With its Día de los
Muertos imagery, bold palette, and pinup sensibility, the work nods to
classic American pulp illustration while reclaiming that aesthetic through a
distinctly Mexican American lens.
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Lalo Cota's Mickey Mouse is bold,
irreverent, and unapologetically subversive—a Chicana reimagining of America's
most sanitized icon. With swagger and bite, Cota flips the symbol of corporate
innocence into a figure of rebellion, exposing the grit and guts beneath the
gloss of American pop culture.
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Walter's Picks
Walter Ramirez | Senior Consignment Director, Urban Art, New York
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In 1980 Chicano Wearing a 1960 Mask, Carlos
Almaraz turns his attention to the figure, using pastel to explore identity,
disguise, and cultural expression. The masked subject feels both vulnerable and
defiant, an embodiment of the tension between public persona and private self.
Almaraz's pastel work is fluid yet deliberate: colors blend and bleed at the
edges, creating a sense of motion and psychological unease. The soft layering
of pigment blurs the boundary between the mask and the face beneath it,
suggesting the shifting nature of Chicano identity and self-representation.
Through this piece, Almaraz transforms pastel into a vehicle for emotion and
meaning, its texture mirroring the complexity of identity itself.
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Chaz Bojórquez's Los Avenues Skull is a powerful charcoal
drawing on tissue paper that captures the spirit of East Los Angeles street
life while showing how far Bojórquez had come as an
artist. The skull, one of his recurring symbols, connects back to his earlier Señor Suerte design, once seen across city walls as a sign
of strength, luck, and cultural identity. In this quieter, more intimate
version, Bojórquez brings that same energy onto
fragile tissue paper, showing his mastery of line and shading while keeping the
raw emotion of his graffiti roots. His background in Chicano calligraphy and
Asian brushwork comes through in the careful movement of each stroke, turning
what could have been a street tag into something deeply personal and
reflective. Created at a time when graffiti was just starting to be recognized
as fine art, Los Avenues Skull stands as a bridge between worlds, a work that
honors his community while claiming space for it inside museums and galleries.
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Ezriel's Picks
Ezriel Wilson | Cataloguer, Fine Arts, Dallas
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Artist Eric Cox's ethereal mixed media work on panel transported me to another
realm in this auction. Until After She Sings, from Cox's Dream
State series, stems from his deep fascination with the human
condition. In the piece, a partially formed figure emerges through only a few
facial features, enticing the viewer to imagine the rest. The figure is haloed
by a sharp white silhouette that dissipates like the smoke curling from the
cigarette in hand. A single eye gazes back, evoking the surrealist spirit-a
movement equally captivated by dreams, the irrational, and the unconscious.
Blooms of color overlap and interplay like a Kubrickian dream sequence,
heightening the work's cinematic tension. Certainly, it is a captivating work
for any dreamer.
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Sometimes even unknown artists leave us wanting more. The
work Mother Earth caught my eye with its powerful symbolism
and the masterful execution of this magnificent watercolor on paper. In the
piece, the head of a female figure wears a crown of tree branches that seem to
burst frantically from her hair. She gazes directly at the viewer, one eyebrow
slightly raised-as if questioning. Black drips of watercolor run down her face
like streaked eye makeup, heavily applied around her lids. Was she crying? Is
she hurt? What can we, the viewers, really do? The artist leaves these questions
open, creating a meditative space to contemplate our impact on not only the
physical world but also the psychological landscape. A wonderful and
thought-provoking addition to grow any collection.
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Aviva Lehmann
Senior Vice President,
American Art
AvivaL@HA.com
(212) 486-3530
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Walter Ramirez
Senior Consignment Director,
Urban Art, New York
WalterR@HA.com
(212) 486-3521
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Ezriel Wilson
Cataloguer, Fine Arts, Dallas
EzrielW@HA.com
(214) 409-1112
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