Roberto Jamora describes the magic of color, the importance of seeing in critical thinking and the legacy of first generation immigrants in the arts.
This episode also features Michelle Yee, assistant professor of Art History at VCUarts.
---
About Roberto Jamora
Roberto Jamora is a Richmond-based artist and educator. He holds an M.F.A. from the State University of New York at Purchase and a B.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts. He is an Assistant Professor in the VCUarts Art Foundation Program.
In Jamora’s series "An Inventory of Traces," color operates as both material and metaphor: gradients become repositories for memory, while layered surfaces suggest accumulation, erasure and return. He mines color from memory, photos, interviews and artifacts from his family. Skin tones, a day at the beach, hiking up a mystical mountain in the Philippines, a sonogram, aging postcards from his uncle to his grandparents from the 1970s, the bayous in Louisiana where Filipinos used to hide, the shapes of rivers, an ordinary day in Virginia. Each gradient and incision are both spectacular and everyday, familiar and distant. Through slow, attentive processes of application and concealment, thin traces of color are revealed. The paintings are quiet provocations, asking the viewer to reflect on the meanings and power of color.
His practice is grounded in an ongoing inquiry into color, memory and perception, approached through abstraction as a means of holding experiences that resist literal representation. He makes this work to better understand how lived moments—personal, cultural and historical—leave traces that persist beyond narrative clarity.
His artwork has been exhibited at the Anderson at VCU, Cody Gallery at Marymount University, Virginia MOCA, Frost Art Museum, Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans, SFA Projects, Antenna, FLXST Contemporary, Page Bond Gallery, ADA Gallery, Topaz Arts, Norte Maar, Open Space, Outlet Fine Art, and Ishmael Bernal Gallery.
He is represented by Bond Millen Gallery in Richmond. His artwork is in collections including the Atlanta Hawks NBA Team, Capital One, CoStar Group, Harvard Kennedy School, Muscarelle Museum of Art at William & Mary, and several private collections.
About Michelle Yee
Michelle Yee, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research focuses on contemporary Asian American and Asian Diasporic art including issues of race and representation, transnational connections and collisions, and cosmopolitanisms. She serves as organizer and chair of the Diasporic Asian Art Network, an affiliate society of the College Art Association. Her writing can be found in journals such as Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Art Journal, Third Text, Panorama and Art Etc., as well as several exhibition catalogues. She holds a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California - Santa Cruz, an M.A. in Art History from the University of Connecticut and a B.A. in Art History and English Literature from Georgetown University.
---
VCUarts Uncharted is recorded in the Community Media Center in the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU. Music by Felipe Letão.
For more information, visit arts.vcu.edu/uncharted.
