Artwork by FELIX QUINTANA For Los Angeles Times Image / Los Angeles Times

"In L.A., there is an abundance of eateries that exist in private — out of a garage, or yard, or home kitchen. An underground food scene that you only know about if you’re lucky or loved. Should you be so fortunate to be invited inside as a guest, you’d find out firsthand how intimate a dining experience can be. Take Miguel and Angela, for example. You wouldn’t know that behind their garage door lies a freezer with more than 20 homemade Oaxacan-style ice cream flavors: leche quemada, mezcal, mamey, nuez. In the back corner there’s a plancha where other Oaxacan specialties are prepared. It’s the kind of space that can pretty much only be found through Instagram, word of mouth, blogs or maps. Recently, two people met outside the garage for a meal and conversation about this IYKYK L.A. food tradition."

- IAN BLAIR for Los Angeles Times Image

Read the Story: The most intimate food experience in L.A. is happening at the crib

"I’ve twice been caught on Google Street View — drinking beer on my porch and riding my bike through Brooklyn, N.Y.— and am always intrigued by the stories that artists make with the images they find on this rather singular system of mapping (not to mention surveillance). L.A. artist Felix Quintana harvests images of L.A. landscapes with personal significance (including a street view image that captured his father) and uses them to create cyanotypes, reports Sarah Quiñones Wolfson. The work is a tribute to his roots and L.A.'s Salvadoran diaspora."

- CAROLINA MIRANDA For Los Angeles Times

Read the story: Going out in Los Angeles? Have we got the culture guide for you

"One afternoon in 2012, a man drove down a residential street in southeast Los Angeles. Unbeknownst to him, at that exact moment, a Google Street View camera nearby snapped a photo of him. Years later, multidisciplinary artist and educator Felix Quintana saw this image and recognized the person in the photograph: his father.

With Google Maps Street View, the focus on buildings and roads diminishes figures. By obscuring the faces caught between moments, people almost appear invisible. In his practice, Quintana manipulates these Google images using cyanotypes, an early photographic technique that produces prints coated with a Prussian shade. With collage-making, he plays around with different textures — some are created with a stucco finish, others smoother. The found materials and assemblage pieces reference signs and landmarks unique to Quintana..."

- SARAH QUIÑONES WOLFSON For Los Angeles Times

Read the story: Google Street View galvanized this artist to create an emotive blueprint of South L.A

HyperAllergic - The Dazzling Local Arts Scene of Southeast Los Angeles

"The arts infrastructure of Southeast Los Angeles County may appear sparse compared to the museums, schools, and studios just a few miles north in the city of LA, but there is no lack of creative and cultural expression amongst residents. Artist Felix Quintana was born and raised in Lynwood, and cites the 1984 Olympic mural by Frank Romero along the Hollywood Freeway, glimpsed on trips to Encino where his mother worked, as his early exposure to art. “Resources were always pretty limited in terms of making art,” he says. “It felt like there wasn’t much in Lynwood.”

After receiving his BA in photography from California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt in 2014, Quintana returned home and encountered a grassroots movement of punk shows, open mic events, and DIY exhibitions held in garages and at venues like the Lynwood Union, a converted railroad depot.

Quintana’s recent show at Residency Gallery, Cruising Below Sunset, featured assemblages of cyanotype prints and found objects, composite reflections of sites with personal significance in SELA, San Jose, and his parents’ home country of El Salvador. In his Los Angeles Blueprints series, he appropriates Google Street View images that feature pedestrians, highlighting street life over cold cartographic documentation. The blue-tinged works are in direct conversation with Ed Ruscha’s 1996 book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, honoring the myriad streets and populations that exist beyond his slim geographical slice."

- Matthew Stromberg for HyperAllergic

https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/felix-quintana-cruising-below-sunset

"Artist and educator Felix Quintana acts like a curator as much as a photographer, carefully selecting images of the Southeast L.A. neighborhoods he grew up in and around by scanning the photographic footage captured by Google Maps Street View. In his current exhibition, "Cruising Below Sunset" at Residency Art Gallery, Quintana chooses past moments, captured incidentally, to highlight people that were originally rendered insignificant. These repurposed images, printed in cyanotype blue, make up the ongoing series, "Los Angeles Blueprints" (2019-present), which is featured in the exhibition alongside "Para Los Little Homies" (2019-present), a series of mixed media collages and one sculptural, three-dimensional collage that hangs by zip ties from the gallery ceiling." - Erica Rawles, KCET Artbound

https://residencyart.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Cruising-Below-Sunset-Felix-Quintana.pdf

Residency Art Gallery is extremely pleased to present Felix Quintana’s solo exhibition titled, Cruising Below Sunset. This exhibition will run from June 4th through July 16th, 2022 with an opening reception that will take place on Saturday, June 4th from 6pm to 9pm. Residency is proud to show yet another exceptional exhibition that highlights our area of South Central Los Angeles, seen through the lens of an artist of the diaspora. So join us this Saturday to celebrate Felix Quintana and the awesome work that he has created. Quintana family pupusas and refreshments will be served and the vibes will be curated by DJ HunnidGee! 🇸🇻🇸🇻

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:
Cruising Below Sunset documents Quintana’s movement across space and time with the places that have shaped his work and life, including Los Angeles, San Jose, and his parents' home country of El Salvador. Cruising Below Sunset is a re-imagining of home, collective memory, and place through Quintana’s experience as a first generation Salvadoran-American from Los Angeles. Featuring new work created during the pandemic, Quintana intrinsically explores analog and digital photography, collage, and sculptural installation processes as well as looking at the street as a site for artistic activism, intervention and critique. Through different threads of this new body of work, Quintana views his hometown Los Angeles being reclaimed and re-imagined as a site of survivance for Black, brown, immigrant, working class people, and all those who are pushing against the realities of gentrification, mass media narratives, and corporate surveillance. Cruising Below Sunset seeks to empower the narrative of migration, movement, and mobility of the Black and Brown diaspora in Los Angeles, for the purpose of elevating one another, and underscoring our futurity through a re-imagining of the past and present moment.

"Several artists explore the diverse possibilities of cyanotype, the tinted contact printing process still used to make architectural blueprints. Felix Quintana derived the source images for his Los Angeles Blueprint series from Google Maps Street View photos of his South Central LA neighborhood, searching for those that accidentally included people. He then made cyanotypes of these images, scratched words and details on top, and gave them titles that only a local would fully understand. The resulting images appear full of life and energy, a record of a community’s experience that stands in sharp contrast to the detached topographical orientation (and surveillance) function Google’s maps generally serve." - Jaimie Baron

https://www.squarecylinder.com/2022/03/writing-with-light-sf-state/

Here’s one for #SELA peeps to be proud of. New episode with @felixfquintana out on the DANCNG SOBR podcast. Felix breaks-it-down to the elements of photography and family. A must watch. #LINKINBIO #youtube #podcast #artisttalk #artistlife #wisewords

This event is presented in partnership with the San Francisco Art Institute and San Francisco State University School of Art. Students (from any school) are always welcome to attend PhotoAlliance lectures for free.

PhotoAlliance believes in an accessible, inclusive and supportive arts community. The income we receive from ticket sales offsets our costs and allows us to pay artists for their work. If you are unable to afford the admission cost of a PhotoAlliance event, we welcome you to join our volunteer team and attend for free, more information BELOW

https://www.photoalliance.org/2022-feb-ron-moultrie-saunders-and-felix-quintana

"In September 2016, the Vincent Price Art Museum opened Tastemakers & Earthshakers: Notes from Los Angeles Youth Culture, 1943-2016, a multimedia exhibition that traversed eight decades of style, art, and music to examine youth culture in Los Angeles. The exhibition featured over 100 artworks by more than 40 artists and collectives, including that of Felix Quintana, a Los Angeles artist and educator currently based in the Bay Area. I visited the exhibition when I was a student at East Los Angeles College, and I was struck by Quintana’s work, whose work on display was technologically unique and unlike anything I had ever seen before. His artwork on display was titled The Repetition of Power, which depicts a group of police officer searching two individuals. Each figure is created with light and the vibrant composition is presented against a solid black background. The gestural rays of light reminded me of a low shutter photography technique where light is manipulated across a photograph. I remember not totally understanding how this object was created but I knew it was something special and worth further exploration."

https://vincentpriceartmuseum.wordpress.com/2021/09/10/felix-quintana-title-tk/

This is the first program in a two-part online series, Teaching for Social Change through Art: Strategies for Enhancing Media Literacy in 2020. In the series, teachers explore strategies for using art to address this current moment in the classroom—whether the classroom is in a physical or virtual space.
In this program, UCLA professor Jeff Share provides an overview of media literacy, museum educators share strategies for analyzing art and media, and teaching artist Felix Quintana demonstrates a digital art activity that juxtaposes personal archives and popular media. This program was held on Monday, July 27, 2020.

"Multidisciplinary artist, Felix Quintana, documents their South LA and Bay area neighborhood in a poetic and creative way."

http://www.totemmag.com/the-way-we-see-an-interview-with-artist-felix-quintana/

https://www.compoundlb.com/editorial/radical-empathy/interview-with-felix-quintana

https://galleryplatform.la/#ana-iwataki-week-1

Curated by Ana Iwataki

"With the twenty artists of this project, I have engaged in a meandering through Los Angeles, a city disguised by the narrative become trope that it is always already a fiction. Our current fiction is a necessary one, as we’ve been reflecting on Los Angeles while moving through it hardly at all. This city is a remembered one, one that we fear will be disappeared and replaced by the time we can immerse ourselves in it again. It's at once highly individualized and diffused, dreamed up from within our homes, both more vulnerable and more imaginative than the totalizing fiction of a map."

https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2020/03/29/818252132/an-la-native-drives-us-through-his-hometown-using-google-street-view

"The sun shines as Felix Quintana cruises through South Central Los Angeles. He's always been inspired by what he sees out of his car window, from the strip malls to the street vendors. "I love the hustle," he says. "The hand-painted signs, the swap meets, the people making money washing windshields."

But those moments can fly by. And his ongoing series of cyanotypes make us pause on the often overlooked Angelenos who work and live in the less glitzy, more gritty neighborhoods of LA County."

http://amadeusmag.com/blog/felix-quintana-existence-resistance-photography/

"To visually document Los Angeles is an intimidating and seemingly impossible task. The city has an incomparable sprawling landscape. Each block has its own story. Each neighborhood has its own culture and people. To sincerely capture the buildings, the familiar faces and businesses that built the community, the sounds and smells of the city’s streets, takes an instinctual eye and inherent wherewithal of the LA urban landscape. Photographer and multidisciplinary artist, Felix Quintana, captures the Angeleno spirit with genuine honesty in his series of cyanotype prints entitled Los Angeles Blueprints — at the root of the series lies two of Quintana’s creative practices, photography and drawing."

published by Amadeus Magazine, Feburary 25th 2020

https://www.somarts.org/events/felixfquintana/

SOMArts, 934 Brannan Street
Los Angeles Blueprints

In his newest body of work, Felix F. Quintana highlights the often-unseen working-class individuals that navigate through Los Angeles. He creates Los Angeles Blueprints at the root of photography and drawing, employing the cyanotype photographic printing process to create an emotional blueprint of the Angeleno, working-class, and migrant experience. Each print is hand-scribed with a velocity of line movement, revealing diverse layers of place, identity, and self within the LA urban landscape. Quintana hybrid approach to image-making allows for a narrative amongst people of color — policemen, street vendors, sex workers, and street hustlers to emerge. Despite the tense climate, Quintana’s subjects exist firmly in their world — as living proof of beauty and resistance amongst an atmosphere of conflict and struggle.

Residency Art Gallery is beyond ecstatic to present HOMEBASE. This group exhibition will run from June 22nd through August 10th, 2019, with an opening reception that will take place on Saturday, June 22nd from 6pm to 9pm. HOMEBASE will feature work from Noah Humes, Kathie Foley-Meyer, Ramiro Gomez Jr., Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Patrick Martinez, Star Montana, Noe Olivas, Devon Tsuno, Raymundo T. Reynoso (EYEONE) and Felix Quintana.

For all intents and purposes, HOMEBASE serves as a love letter to Los Angeles. This exhibition’s endeavor is to draw attention to those stories of those Angelenos not seen in everyday media, as well as highlight unnoticed areas in our city. Stories such as homelessness, community, family and everyday struggles to just exist in a city with one of the largest wealth gaps in the United States. Participating artists were challenged to create works that aesthetically capture narratives, moments and settings that embody our internal, localized perception of this city we all love and call home. This exhibition came to fruition through Grand Park’s Our L.A. Voices, held in April of this year, in which Residency Art Gallery participated.

http://residencyart.com/exhibitions/homebase/

light painting animation created in collaboration with Robin Lasser

thedotproject.com

http://www.fototazo.com/2017/02/latam-f100-karen-miranda-rivadeneira-felix-quintana.html

http://www.lataco.com/felix-quintana-preview/

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2016/oct/13/tastemakers-earthshakers-los-angeles-youth-culture

http://www.artnews.com/2016/11/02/tastemakers-earthshakers-at-vincent-price-art-museum-monterey-park-california/

http://studiovisit.la/artists/felixquintana