Dixie Salazar has been a working artist and writer for 40 years. Salazar was once a part-time lecturer for the English department at Fresno State for 16 years and retired last year. She spends her retirement as an active participant in the artistic community.
Salazar’s artwork is figurative and a common theme in her artwork and writings is discovering identity.
“My heritage is a dual nationality: Anglo on my mother’s side and Hispanic on my father’s side. Being mixed makes you feel like you don’t belong to any one race and I think this is why identity is an important aspect of my work,” Salazar said.
This process can be seen in a piece entitled “Spanish Cooking,” an assemblage in a box format in which Salazar used aspects of recipes from both cultures. Inside there are stamps from Spain and the United States, an electrical device, beads, chiles (peppers) and cucharas (spoons), bones, cards from the Spanish loterÃa (a Spanish Bingo style game), directions for the recipe and even a “D” for Dixie.
Salazar is also a successful published poet and author. Her first novel, “Limbo,” was published in 1995 and was followed by three novels of poetry: “Hotel Fresno,” “Reincarnation of the Commonplace” and “Blood Mysteries.” In 2010 her volume of poetry, “Flamenco Hips and Red Mud Feet” was released. This fall, she is set to release “Altar for Escaped Voices” from the Ash Tree Poetry Series.
“Dixie’s paintings are expressionistic, narrative and very complex. She is a brilliant writer and there is definitely a connection between the visual language of poetry and the visual language of art,” longtime art colleague Grude McDermott said.
Salazar digs into her poetry as well as her family history for inspiration. “When You Get Mad at Him Do What I Do, Buy a Hat,” is a crossed over from one of her poems.
“My grandmother would actually go out and buy a hat when she was mad at my grandfather. The story in my family was that she had hundreds of hats, but that no one knew how many she really had. I wrote a poem about this piece of family history and it inspired the painting,” Salazar said.
Jonathan Mathis, the web coordinator for the College of Health and Human Services, is currently finishing a documentary on Salazar and says it was inspired by Salazar’s stories.
Salazar said each of her paintings can hold more than one story and can vary from person to person.
“Artwork changes and evolves with time and the viewer. When I work on a piece, it changes even as I’m working on it. Later, when I revisit a piece, I find that it changed again or I see something I didn’t see the first time,” said Salazar.
Mathis says Salazar’s artwork is easily accessible and that Salazar herself is extraordinarily approachable. “You can feel her creativity bursting out and students, particularly art students, should want to visit her gallery. You can get direct information from Dixie without the gallery or art museum as a go-between. You walk into the place where she works and you feel more connected to the art because you can see her paintbrushes and her materials where she actually paints,” Mathis said.
As for Salazar, she says the importance of ArtHop is the opportunity to talk to a lot of people and get some feedback.