It's a rainy Friday night at the Kemper Museum Crossroads in Kansas City – a group of ten poets from the Latino Writers Collective (LWC) are sitting before an audience ready to pay homage to artist Ana Maria Hernando, whose work is on display there. Lining the walls and covering a large area of the floor is ‘When Women Sing', works of paper and hand-crocheted petticoats from this South American artist. The synergy of the Collective inspired by Hernando surrounds the room bringing it to a harmonic convergence.
As President of the LWC since 2005, Faus' humor and self-deprecation are just the dynamics of his character. Jose Faus is a modern day "Renaissance Man". With an art career that crosses between painting, writing and community involvement, he maintains a distinct narrative and ambiguity to keep his work introspective, mysterious and likeable.
The LWC is a group of Latino writers living and working in the Kansas City metropolitan area and throughout the Midwest. Their mission as a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization is to foster an environment where the voices of Latino students, blue collar workers, professionals, and homemakers can be heard, enabling them to contribute their experience and vision to the larger community.
The LWC has had readings on the local college circuit in the Kansas City Metro area including: Avila University, Park University, Penn Valley Community College, Rockhurst University and the University of Missouri – Kansas City. The group also reads at the Writers Place and Mattie Rhoades Center both in Kansas City and has travelled to Chicago and Denver.
Recently, Jose was invited to read in Salina, Kansas for the spring poetry series as a featured writer and was "totally charged" by the experience. After reading at Bentonville (Arkansas) Community College, he has been invited back for their 2011 Spring Literary Festival.
In addition to his work with the LWC, Jose is also a painter and sculptor. This past summer he completed two murals in Kansas City's Historic Northeast area. The first mural was funded by a grant from the United Missouri Bank and included other sponsors: Westside Housing, LISC and Scarritt Renaissance Neighborhood Association. The second mural was funded by LISC and Central Bank and was sponsored by the Northeast Chamber of Commmerce, Westside Housing and other community organizations.
The monument restoration was a concrete relief sculpture at Iron Horse Estates at 154th Street and Mission Road in Leawood, Kansas. He is currently finishing a restoration of a mural in downtown Kansas City, Kansas for a local business.
Jose notes an artist is bound to the community, even if it lived in the margins. He recalls attending a meeting several years back where people were discussing "community revitalization". However, most of the people there were developers, residents, professionals, working class people and Jose was the only one who identified as an artist. It felt odd, he thought, but then again he also thought, why shouldn't an artist be in the making of a community? One can put on a blindfold, point to any location on a map of the United States and find all the essentials: schools, post offices, libraries, movie theatres, big box stores and highways. However, it is the artists in each community that serve as unique catalysts in the way a community activates and identifies itself to the larger world.
Material for Jose's writing and painting come to him from the mural painting as he is in the street, running into people there. Things that happen on the streets help compose the poetry and some of his writing would not exist without those situations.
He says there is no way to separate one from the other. In his studio work, it is about mood and tone and things like line and movement, color and shape. He likes creating an illusion of something that does not feel controlled on a two-dimensional canvas or paper, leaving it ambiguous. "You should not know where the first line starts or ends but yet still have the sense that a narrative is taking place," Jose says.
Regarding his art business, Jose finds that the usual issues are problematic - time, space, funding and how one pursues it.
He has made it a priority to always have a studio and has had one for the last fourteen years. This is a business decision he has stuck by. Although doing taxes may be drag, Jose has learned the tax system works to one's benefit and that includes having his own insurance, which is 100% deductible. He says, "I have no excuse for not having insurance!"
Money will always be a necessary evil. He says somebody out there has figured out that there is a ton of money to be made on art and office supplies. When times are good, Jose buys and stores away for the lean times. He says he almost had a heart attack recently when rolls of paper he bought three years ago for $70 where now going for $245 each.
Jose sums up his life as an artist in this way: "The down times are trying but the one thing I know is that this is not something you retire from. Why would I want to? I think that is the greatest benefit of being an artist. If retirement is the space and time you carve for yourself at the end of your working life to do what you really want in life then this must be heaven 'cause I retired fourteen years ago."
Jose is a Fall 2009 Artist INC Fellow and an Artist INC Peer Facilitator.
Written by Blair Schulman, 2010