Ricardo Acevedo

Can you tell us your name, age, hometown, and passion?

My name is Ricardo Acevedo. I am 48 years old. I was born and raised in San Bernardino, California and then spent a number of years in San Francisco which I consider the place where I defined who I am creatively. My passion is creativity as a whole but if I had to pigeonhole it, then my passion is to help society understand how much creativity directs, moves and coordinates culture. I’m very culturally motivated and that also means helping people learn through art how culture changes them.

What forms of art do you pursue and explore?

I feel at times that I have been provided with an over abundance of creative skills on a number of different levels and I have always had a hard time sticking to one creative aspect. I am a photographer, a graphic artist, a writer, a poet. I’ve directed a number of different music videos and short films. I perform music with an improvisation jazz group as well. I write songs on a more concrete level which could be anywhere from pop to extreme avant-garde. I have always been that way so my passion is overt creativity, to my detriment. Being this way can make it kind of hard to fit into society.

What are you working on right now?

I did my first show of a series that I have been working on. I’m taking photos of mixed race individuals and couples. They say that in America by 2040 the Caucasian race will no longer be the majority. There will be an equal number that has married different races. Yet, when they say that I don’t think anybody is counting how many mixed race individuals there will be. So my latest fascination is capturing Americans as they move towards that year. It goes all the way back to when I was a kid, we used to watch Star Trek and my mother always thought it was so cool because there was a black woman on the main deck. I remember turning to her as a child at that time and saying, Mom! If it is 2332, wouldn’t everybody on earth kinda already have had sex with each other? Wouldn’t everybody just be different shades of brown by then? I think it was the first time in my life that I made my mom dumbfounded. She didn’t know what to say. I guess somewhere in the back of my mind it has always been a point of contention. The other thing that has been working my brain as I’m getting older is the idea of how we define beauty in culture, specifically with age. We put the beauty of woman up on pedestals so much. I can still look at a picture of Sophia Loren and my heart races. America unfortunately is so brainwashed towards youth beauty, that I have been trying to do a series of nudes and work with older models. It all goes back to the drive in me; how art interacts with culture. I think that is always going to be my most specific passion.

How did your passion unfold and where did it lead you?

I can’t remember a time as a child when I wasn’t singing, dancing, drawing and writing.  At first they thought I was hyper active and they wanted to give me all these drugs to dumb me down. Somehow I got lucky and a teacher noticed that if you channeled my creativity in a certain way, great things happened. That was both good and bad. In the 60’s and 70’s, when I was in school, they were trying a lot of experimental ways of educating kids. What ended up happening was I never had to take math classes beyond fractions. I never had to take any sort of grammar or spelling because of the creative things I was excelling in. Everybody thought for sure I would be fine and that my creativity would take care of me. Unfortunately I ended up in the world very unprepared for the realities. It took me a number of years to get my act together.

I started off as an illustrator, drawing quite a bit, but at the same time I decided that I was going to try my first hand at animation in elementary school. I was drawing everything. As a child I went into my creative senses very deeply. I had a very violent, turbulent household, and I’m not sure about this but it might have something to do with my creative nature. I was 14 when my stepfather died in a bar fight. It was right at the time where I could have used some male interaction. It was the 70’s and I dove head first into drugs and that is when I first started dabbling into photography, mixing it with my illustration, all the while I was still writing poetry. When you are a kid, short little sentences mean everything. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy novels. I devoured cultural anthropology books, learned about other cultures and other people and the way they thought.

By the time I reached my late teens, the new wave / punk scene started to come into place in America and where I grew up. When I was 20, my mother died of cancer and I was left with a chunk of money. I bought my first synthesizer and music would be my main love for the next 12 years. I continued to write short stories and dabble in photography. I also wrote and performed in various musical groups that could best be described as electronic based avant new wave. I really just applied myself completely in my 20’s and my passion reached the point where it was completely obvious that this is what I was meant to do; that feeling really grabbed me.

Were there any mental barriers or fears that you had to overcome?

Because of my upbringing I was very insecure. I think I had a real problem with what people thought of me. Most people who come from dysfunctional homes go through a thing where they don’t feel loved. One of the reasons that I was driven towards the musical performance and performance art in general, was because I could get immediate response for my creativity and most of the time the response would be positive. And heck, I was getting laid and sexuality can compensate for lack of emotional connection. For years that is what I qualified as human interaction: good sex.

How about any physical barriers?

The same year my stepfather died I broke my left arm very badly, it basically collapsed like an accordion and I had to have it rebuilt. I don’t really have feeling in my left hand or little finger and the one next to it. Subsequently, even though I would die to be able to play guitar, I can only play a minor amount of rhythm guitar. I can’t turn the hand completely over so that is a physical barrier. Hmm, I’ve always been skinny, ha! Really, there has been no overt physical barrier.

Who would you say encouraged you and discouraged you and how did that effect you?

My biggest influence was a guy who was about 10 years older than me and who came into one of my first bands, Freaks Amor. His name is Jack Johnson, not the folk singer of today. He came from the east coast, where he had participated in the whole “Happenings” scene in Greenwich Village during the 1970’s. He had moved out to California and had taken a job as of all things a bricklayer. Jack had this premise that all things creative are within the grasp of anybody as long as they are willing to attempt it. You can pick up a guitar or trumpet and start playing it; find a note you can actually sing in, things like that. His idea was that there are no barriers; the barriers are only the things we set up within ourselves. Although I had always known this in my head, I had never had anybody reinforcing that for me.

Jack was the first person to tell me that the natural intuition towards creativity is more important than anything else about it. For a lack of better term, it is almost like a gravitational pull. He was the first person who helped me define it with a sense of comfort. Until I started working with him I didn’t think that what I was doing was ever good enough.

At the same time I dealt with negativity because I had no real love for popular culture; I was really a lover of counter culture. It always completely frustrated me that people didn’t want to listen to something new, something original. I could never figure it out! Why would you wanna’ go listen to that, it’s been done a hundred times! I was not averse to saying that to people in public and I was taken to be a bit of a snob by a number of people. It got me in trouble a lot; I lost friends, girlfriends, got into fights. It made me start to create acronyms. I did that with tons of things. I took the term punk to mean for me, Pride Under New Knowledge. I wanted to break down barriers. Then I took art, and to me art means: Active Radical Thought. I don’t see the need to play it safe in art. All the safe stuff has been done. The only thing that is really left in the realm of art is the radical stuff: the stuff that makes people talk, pisses them off, makes them afraid, makes them uncomfortable, and makes them think. That is what I have always strove for. The acronyms I came up with when I was young provided me with some sense of purpose.

You sign things r/ace. Does that mean anything?

I started out by signing things R. Acevedo and that got shortened. And then I realized that one of the things I’m very aware of is the mixing of race in the world and that the future of earth is all about the mixing of races, cultures and ideas. It becomes a race towards the higher mind; a race towards human potential. That is probably why I like Barack Obama so much, even though people don’t refer to him as mixed race, he is. To me he represents the full promise of America, the mixing of two races to create a President that has a foot in both ponds.

What set you apart from other people?

I questioned everything; I got in trouble for asking too many questions in class.

As a child I was a huge liar and it had lots to do with my insecurity because of my upbringing. I lost a lot of friends because of that. I didn’t want to admit that the world I was living in was full of violence and alcoholism. I wasn’t afraid to interact with people but I would lie to them, depressingly so. I still have friends from back then and they have accepted my humble apologies about those days and have seen the bigger picture; I’m not that bad of a guy after all. There were times when they didn’t want anything to do with me. I really can’t blame them. It was safer for me to create a fictitious world in my head than really confront the one around me.

Can you tell us about your strengths and weaknesses?

I think my strength is to always look for a way to fix things or a way to do things outside of the box, also creatively. Also I work to innovate as opposed to go with the flow, even though in my day-to-day life I’m really good at going with the flow.

My greatest weakness is that to this day I am still insecure. When my mother died when I was 20 I never had a chance to be an adult with her and find out why she stayed with that terrible man for so many years and why she put me through it with her. If there is anything that can totally deconstruct me in a moment, it is a female friend telling me that she doesn’t trust me. If I’m told that it resonates deeply within me. I wish I could get over but I don’t think I can because I cannot talk to my mother.

I’ve become very honest now in my life to a fault. People either really dig that or they can’t handle it. It is the backlash I think of being such a liar as a child.

What is the meaning of life for you?

My grandfather inspired this definition. The meaning of life for me is to burn as brightly as possible to illuminate the path for the next person in line. You can dumb that down to being the best person that you can be so that you have information to pass on to those who come after you. That is the way that I have approached everything as I’ve gotten older and started to really look at the way I work with the world. Being as my friends call me, a creative mad man, it works for me because I burn true ideas and concepts.

How do you perceive society?

I can only speak for American culture. America is unfortunately a country that was founded and based on the premise of fear. I see art as an agent of information and sometimes the most subversive way of getting information to the masses. I think people are still very uneducated and by that people become prejudice and biased because they don’t understand the other. With no understanding of the other they have no desire to know the other. It’s art’s responsibility in culture to create curiosity and make people wonder about other things.

I think we live in a time where fear has become a really strong energy in western culture, with religion and government working that fear in tandem. I hate to sound like a hippie but where is love in all of this? Love ends up being a very passive energy that you have to go to, it doesn’t go to you as much. It’s the classic example that you always remember the worst things before you remember the best things. We have the tendency to remember pain more. I think it is because the culture around us supports that energy, the sense of fear and pain. We give in to pain and fear. I personally wish there was more bravery in the world and not the type of bravery were you picture the guy running with a gun into the crossfire. I wish that humans in general were braver, that we would take more chances.

Is there any advice you can give to people holding themselves back?

I would tell people to scare themselves and to do things that scare them. Do things that make you afraid for your life, and that can be you intellectual, spiritual or physical life. That rush will make you feel more alive than sitting on the floor meditating.

You have to know how to use both positive and negative energy to your advantage. You have to know the density of human emotions and the only way you are ever going to get that is by truly experiencing life, by getting out there and getting your hands dirty.

What is your next dream?

I’m getting back into music somewhat. I have some ideas for some films I want to do. I’m getting back into writing again.

At some point in my life I would love to have a hundred acre ranch where I could invite artists to come up and have workshops and share ideas. I would love to have a place like that before I die. But this is not to say a place that would be so insolated that it would not interact with the world. I think artists need to open up to the world to take information in and use it in their art, rather than just using their feelings and emotions. The primary goal of all creative endeavors is evolution and I would like all creative folks to be more conscious of their responsibility in the evolutionary aspects of humanity.

What is most important to you in life?

Learning to accept love. Only in the last 10 years have I really understood the premise of unconditional love, especially because I have children now. If you are going to accept love you have a responsibility. You don’t necessarily have to give it back in the same way it’s given to you but you need to be aware of it and what it means when somebody gives it to you. That is where I’m at right now.

I live for my children, for reconnecting with my wife Susan and for doing my best to understand, educate and learn from all things and people around me.

What are you most proud of in you life?

My children. That is an easy question. Talk about an ultimate art form! (laughs)

To learn more about Ricardo and his work click on the links below:

www.intherastudios.com

www.myspace.com/whoisblank

www.myspace.com/blankoone

www.myspace.com/idmusix