La Raza Project

La RazaLa Raza Artists is a group of Canadian visual artists engaged in cross-cultural collaborations. These encounters provide a spark for valuable exchanges and creative explorations. As a collective, the artists come from a diverse range of backgrounds, but all have a common interest in engaging in challenging projects with artists, both in Canada and worldwide. The group uses murals, painting, printmaking, photography and other accessible art forms as ways to engage with artists as well as with their communities.

La Raza Artists are independently supported, responding to initiatives as they arise. Their vision is to use the power of public art and presentations to affirm a humanistic sensibility, focusing on art over rhetoric. Over the past several years, the group has worked on projects in Argentina, Mexico and Cuba as well as in various parts of Canada.

Point of Contact, Cuba

 

La Raza artists, in collaboration with Cuban artists, designed and painted the mural called Point of Contact - Idea of North. It expresses layered facets of the north, particularly as a visionary landscape lying beyond the conventional boundaries of maps. Imagery includes the floating form of a canoe that contains symbolic elements from the natural world, a series of striving figures below, a tower of antlers, a compass, and a pair of ravens. Flanking these birds is a stamp with an image of the Tocorroro, the national bird of Cuba. Leading the procession of images is a mythic figure above an urban winter landscape of highways and commerce. 

Canadian & Cuban Artists: Gerald Pedros, Esther Rausenberg, Brian Saby, Richard Tetrault

Project: 
La Raza