“Between Dreams, Clouds and Latin American Memories – Entre Sueños, Nubes y Recuerdos Latinoamericanos”
On display January to March 2025
About the Macondo Project: The Macondo Project is a multidisciplinary collective in which Magical Realism or Fantastic Realism serves as a tree where its participants explore cultural roots and other influences through their artistic practices and disciplines. Macondo members share the idea that place of origin is not solely tied to geographic location, but is an ongoing conversation informed by cultural heritage, lived experiences, individuality, and many more influences that form the branches on this same tree. Our goal is to create a more empathetic and united society through the arts.
Macondo is the name of the mythical town that Gabriel García Márquez created in the pages of 100 Years of Solitude and which we have adopted as a symbol of the collective identity that we share as immigrants or descendants of Latin America and its people.
Meet the Macondo Project Artists
JACoBO LOVO
Jacobo Lovo is a Nicaraguan born artist, art educator and curator. He immigrated to the US in 1986 with his family and has since established deep roots in Southeastern Wisconsin. Jacobo graduated from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2000 with a BFA in Painting, and a minor in Drawing. He achieved an art education licensure from Alverno College while teaching and his appreciation for the visual arts deepend as a classroom Art teacher for 16 years when he taught students from kindergarten to college. In 2016 he was invited to lead Latino Arts Inc. as the Managing Artistic Director. At Latino Arts Inc. Jacobo has forged connections with Latin American artists which facilitated co-founding the Macondo Project Collective with Richie Morales. Jacobo’s artwork is deeply influenced by memory, lived experiences, cultural roots, his immigrant experience and an ongoing exploration of Magical Realism as a literary genre that serves as a staging point for his subject matter.
neto atkinson
Neto (Ernesto) Atkinson is a Guatemalan-born American painter born on June 11th, 1981. In 2007 Atkinson began his artistic training and received a BFA from North Dakota State University and a master’s degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a Master of Arts in Art Therapy in 2014.
Neto Atkinson is known professionally as Ernesto Atkinson in the Mental Health field of art therapy where he uses art as a way to become a witness to his participant's personal growth by engaging in an adaptive and creative path of self-exploration.
Neto’s passion for art and art making grew out of his desire to capture awe and wonder on his canvas. He is a revolutionary of color and an alchemist of the paintbrush; a gardener of artistic seeds, that explores the neutrality of things in their natural state. He has demonstrated an extraordinary artistic talent as he embarks on every new journey to different cultures, exploring his understanding of the human connection and art, which solidifies his belief that art is and active agent of change.
Neto is an exceptionally prolific painter whose creative achievements and revolutionary artistic accomplishments focus on the representation of the contemporary movement of his own existence and experience. His artistic representations are based on his daily life, and on his own philosophy. Neto is considered a colorful poet who leaves a message of peace, love, wonder and awe with each color and stroke on a canvas.
Rodrigo Carapia: Visual artist/muralist
Rodrigo Carapia is a self-taught artist who originates from Mexico City, Mexico. Carapia has lived and worked in Madison, Wisconsin, for 15 years. He first began with street art, which allowed him to experiment with his art on bigger scales. When he moved to Madison, Wisconsin, in 2008, he started to perfect his craft on canvas and paper. Once his brush touches the canvas, the work he portrays becomes an epitome of his rich Mexa culture. As an artist and activist, Carapia uses his work as a form of self-expression and resistance by offering art workshops in schools, juvenile shelters, and juvenile correctional centers, giving the youth a form of expression and a sense of freedom. His work has been donated to grassroots organizations that help the undocumented community – and workers unions. You might spot his art around Wisconsin in murals, restaurants, and shows.
His work has been recognized by several publications and news channels, including Wisconsin State Journal, The Cap Times, Madison 365, Isthmus, Telemundo Wisconsin, La Comunidad News, Madison Magazine. Tone Madison highlighted Carapia in a ten-minute documentary short titled, Jaguar.
TUWILÊ ROOTS
Tuwilê Roots is a afro-latino from Brazil, geographer, activist, visual artist, and educator who combines multiple disciplines in his practice. His work with stencil art uniquely integrates landscape and corporality, focusing on Afro-Diaspora, and the revision of visual representations.
His artistic journey includes notable contributions to Brazilian literature, having illustrated Issue 10 of Opiniães Magazine for the dossier "Black Presence in Brazilian Literature" (2017). The same year, his work was featured in the StencilArt Prize exhibition in Sydney, Australia.In 2021, Roots conducted the "Black Writings" (Grafias Negras) panel at the Enzo Antonio Silvestrin Municipal School in São Paulo, proposing Black narratives as a pedagogical tool.
As an art educator, Roots has made significant international contributions. In 2019, he taught Afro-Brazilian Culture at the SparksSchool network in Soweto, South Africa, and participated in the "Virada de Cores" project in Heliópolis favela, São Paulo. In 2023, he collaborated with the Little Picasso project in Madison, United States, creating a collaborative panel.
Currently pursuing his doctorate at the University of São Paulo, his research focuses on using Hip-Hop and Graffiti as pedagogical tools to understand Landscape.
Issis Macias
Issis Macias, a self-taught artist and daughter of Mexican immigrants, was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. In 2020, amid the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic and a significant career shift, she became a new mother and embraced her art as a means of healing. Primarily working with acrylic and oil pastels on canvas, her intuitive abstraction style, brought to life through vibrant colors, explores the spectrum of human experience, transforming the deeply personal into the universal. Now based in Madison, Macias continues to maintain strong ties to Los Angeles through various artistic collaborations.
Macias is a recipient of the Micaela Salinas Artist Fellowship sponsored by Latinos Organizing for Understanding and Development in Madison, WI. She was a finalist for the 2023 Forward Art Prize, presented by the Women Artists Forward Fund, has been accepted into the 2023-2025 Bridge Work Program at Arts + Literature Laboratory in Madison, and is a member of the Madison Art Guild. Her work is held in private collections across the U.S., Mexico, and Europe.
francisco mora
Francisco X. Mora, a Mexico City, Mexico native, has shown his artwork in galleries across the United States including the Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Racine Art Museum and the Mexican Museum of Art. “It seems that I was born drawing,” said Mora. “Since as long as I can remember, a pencil or a crayon has been in my right hand.” Mora studied art in Mexico and came to Milwaukee in 1980, where he studied printmaking. In his artwork, Mora likes to illustrate people and animals from his boyhood days. His work lies in a sense of the whimsical in everyday life. Mora is an author/illustrator of many children’s books and people of all ages are drawn to his work for its fun and fantastical characters from Mexican folklore. The fine lines and playful colors are consistent with his simplistic compositions.
Music is especially important to Mora, and he often incorporates musical themes and instruments into his works. As Mora describes, “I have always thought that music was the first cousin of painting. I would have loved being a musician but painting got me first and wouldn’t let go."
Memory is another strong theme that can be seen in many of Mora's works, as his art often includes people recalled from childhood. Friends, relatives and pets appear, often in humorous fashion.
RICHIE MORALES
I am a self-taught painter that does not hesitate in his stroke. I explore the accident as a form of communion with the unknown and regularly reflect about the role of art in social justice.
Since childhood in Guatemala, I have experimented with textures and materials while working in trades of carpentry and construction work that today I integrate into my painting. My life is marked by signs of socio-economic violence as well as with legacies of personal and community resilience.
Art is for me the only space where light and darkness, the grotesque and beautiful, love and fear can integrate with each other to birth a fuller whole. And because of this, I keep painting.
In my path I had the opportunity to participate in multiple artistic collaborations across our continent of America, and I currently live in Madison, Wisconsin.
ANGELICA CONTRERAS
Latinx artist whose work has an open dialogue about identity and social issues, especially those of immigrant communities.
Contreras was born in Whittier, California and moved to Guadalajara, Jalisco at an early age. There she began studying printmaking at the Instituto Cabañas as well as in other local artist workshops. Later on, she attended the University of Guadalajara, receiving a B.A. in art in 2008 and a Masters in Art Education in 2016. Her artwork has been shown in exhibitions in Mexico and the U.S., including “The Hidden Faces/ Los Rostros Ocultos” at Latino Arts Inc in Milwaukee and “What We Inherit: Remnants of
Light and Space” at the Overture Center in Madison, WI. She was a recipient of the Forward Art Prize in 2020, an annual award targeted to support the work of female artists in Dane County. She currently lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin, where she continues to create and showcase her art.