Today we’d like to introduce you to Omar Khalid.
Hi Omar, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My name is Omar Khalid. I started in art in 2012 at the age of 17. At that time, I was self-taught drawing, I drew very well, despite not having taken drawing classes before. One day, I met Joel Tostado, a street artist who did pastel portraits. He opened a drawing workshop near where I lived, and I signed up for his classes. I was only in the classes for six months. Professor Joel saw potential in my drawings and told me about a program that trained artists, the Baja California Artistic Talent Program. It was a state program that belonged to the Ministry of Culture (ICBC), directed at that time by the Russian teacher Zarema Tchivirova (R.I.P.), which consisted of free master classes and scholarships to support talented children and young people. So, I prepared my art portfolio, applied to the call, and was selected. I started my classes that same year with a Cuban teacher named Jhosell Rosel. The teacher was very good, and by the end of the year, I had my first group exhibition at the Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT). That was my first approach to art, and I was delighted. I met very talented people at that show, and I knew that was my path. When I turned nineteen, they could no longer give me the scholarship because the Talent Program was until the age of eighteen, but the teacher Zarema, who had a special affection for her students, did not want me to leave and hired me as an assistant teacher.
For the following year the teacher got sick and had to leave the Talent Program, the teacher and artist Ignacio Habrika took over the coordination of the Program and I began to give painting classes to the group of children.
In 2016 I entered to study the Bachelor of Arts at the Autonomous University of Baja California, UABC. because my goal was to become a professional artist.
By that time, I already had a lot of experience and many group exhibitions throughout the state. And that same year I had my first solo exhibition at the ICBC Tijuana gallery.
Within the university, I had the opportunity to visit Cuba in an artist residency within the XIII Havana Biennial, where I met artists from various parts of the world and presented a performance piece together with the German artist Frederike Koenitz, entitled “Embassy of World Transit”.
In 2018, together with my fellow faculty member, Angélica Omaña, and a collective of students, we started a student self-managed project of art exhibitions for university students called Muro Verde Tijuana. We carried out this project for four years with the purpose of disseminating the work of emerging artists who found it difficult to exhibit in institutions due to lack of trajectory, and we organized their first exhibition. We learned about exhibition design, museography, and curatorship, and in 2022, we obtained the FONCA grant, which allowed us to hold exhibitions in different municipalities and in spaces such as the Ángulo Gallery in Tijuana, the Tecate City Gallery and the Centro Estatal de las Artes in Mexicali. It also allowed us to design a printed catalog with a compilation of 40 solo exhibitions that we organized from 2018 to 2022 with artists from Tijuana, Mexicali, Rosarito, and Ensenada. That catalog was our first small contribution to the historical and cultural memory of our state, an archive of young artists who promised to be the new generation of Baja Californian artists.
Thanks to the Muro Verde Tijuana project, Angélica and I were invited to do a curatorship and exhibition for the 206 Arte Contemporáneo gallery with the sisters Mónica and Melisa Arreola, who run the gallery, which was very successful and had visits from important curators.
In 2023, the gallery 206 Arte Contemporáneo invited me to exhibit my work individually. There I had my most recent exhibition “FRENO Y DESPEGUE, prototipos para el fracaso”. That same year, I was selected in the XXIV Plastic Biennial of Baja California, which opened in the municipality of Ensenada.
Currently, I am a beneficiary of the PECDA grant, with which I develop a multidisciplinary project that deals with migration, but from a metaphorical point of view, where I created a fictional alien world, with which I intend to play with rhetoric to understand the political and social situations that affect my city for being a border city.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Fortunately, I have always had the support of my family, which I consider the most important thing when you are young, and you are deciding about your future. That has made it easier for me to make the right decisions about what I really like, which is art. Of course, it is a difficult path, especially in Mexico, where art is little supported and there is no culture of appreciation or consumption of art. It is difficult to be an artist because the path is uncertain, and there is constant uncertainty about the future, but little by little, we try to create a community among the young artists themselves and those with more experience to support each other. Tijuana has many artists, and it is a city that grows every day, so the artistic community is large and is getting stronger, but we still have the hardest work to do, which is to bring the population closer to art and make it an everyday thing.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I am currently developing a series of pieces around my research called Martian Aesthetics. I work creating a fictional universe where the world’s population has become extinct, and some Martian beings come down to Earth. These Martians begin to explore to learn about the human past, and in their explorations, they find vestiges, objects that they collect and reinterpret according to their own experience, thus giving a new point of view about humanity. In my most recent project, I work with materials obtained from irregular dwellings in the city and houses of migrant people who have arrived in Tijuana, and I transform those materials and turn them into sculptures of spaceships. My work is completely metaphorical, where the Martian represents the migrant people exploring new territories, and the spaceship represents those new houses of migrant people that “land” every day in the city in search of new life opportunities.
I usually work from painting, but I like the symbolism of the object, so I work with assemblage sculpture because I consider that the recycled material has a lot of meaning and history that contribute to my artistic discourse.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: omarkhalid_artist
