Artist E. J. Curry calls his work Hip Expressionist. In Southern California, basketball and hip hop music kept him safe from violence and racism. In Utah, where he enrolled in the University of Utah’s fine arts program and earned his bachelor’s degree in painting and drawing, Curry has cultivated expressive power from the duality of rule-breaking street experience and the structure-building elements of his academic training.

Thirty of Curry’s works comprise a new exhibition — Hip Hop: A New Visual Approach to an Old Academic Paradigm — at the Mestizo Institute of Culture and Arts (631 W North Temple). An opening reception will be held at Mestizo Friday, Oct. 3, from 7 to 10 p.m.

Curry’s exhibition will be open until Nov. 2. The opening is part of A Night of Art on the Westside which also includes the unveiling of 337 Project’s Urban Gallery at Neighborhood House.

Drawing in part from the inspiration of graffiti artists, Curry accentuates his acrylic paintings with bold strokes of permanent marker — emblems of confidence that cannot be erased, much like a teacher in class or an employee at a job meeting would use on a white board. In others, aggressive-looking zig-zag marks reflect the times in his formative years when he witnessed violence but yet they still don’t belie the life-affirming hopes of love and self-actualization. As he indicates in his artistic statement:

“The masked figures represent the hiding of one’s identity. The figures are informed by tribal cultural understandings, memory, hip hop magazines, media, old school graffiti art (80s and 90s) representing that Hip-Hop is culture and universal such as academics in higher education is. The white outline is to give a modern day expressive approach towards popping the figure forward, voicing attention at full front.”

Even as a child, Curry, now 26, marked everything he could touch. “I was like a young action painter splashing and throwing food, crayons — you name it,” he recalls. “In elementary school, like any other child, I was fascinated with cartoon characters and comic heroes.” The iconic Looney Tunes characters were among his favorites as well as the Spawn comic hero. “In elementary school, kids used to pay me one dollar to draw them a cartoon character or comic hero that was cool,” he adds.

His influences range broad and deep. From the art world, there is Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), a New York graffiti artist turned painter who in the late 1970s and 1980s approached art much like a hip hop DJ would: pulling and culling text, symbols, imagery, and styles from disparate sources and remixing them onto brilliant canvases. Equally important for Curry is Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), the great Russian painter who emphasized that the immediacy of musical expression could be transferred in colorful visual abstract forms. For Kandinsky, the spiritual starting point in his work always was color — as it is in the case of Curry’s work. For example, grey was a bottomless pit for Kandinsky, while yellow represented, in his words, “the human energy which assails every obstacle blindly, and bursts forth aimlessly in every direction.” Curry’s works also reflect the influences of Pollack and Picasso as well as Bua and Van Gogh.

Then there is music. Never working from preliminary sketches, Curry channels music — hip hop, R&B, soul, and jazz — to get his painting juices, and the colors, flowing. And, he is prolific. During school, he turned out 72 paintings in one month. Tupac Shakur, whose legacy is well sustained even 12 years after his death, is a prominent musical influence.

Curry’s work seems particularly timely now in the midst of an historic presidential campaign. His artistic statement is emphatic in its positive orientation:

“I work from the unconscious vs. conscious state of mind meditatively. I do not always know what it is I am doing until it is done but that is the exciting part. Art has set me free to create a visual voice which sends out a positive message that comes from the ‘self’ and what we as human beings experience together not segregated by race but share common emotions, feelings, etc. What separates are individuality, choices, sides and situations. My goal is to try to unite as many souls through my art or to have the mind thinking about one’s placement in life. I invite you to feel this beautiful power of struggle, happiness, pain, and love of life.”

The sense of creative urgency is well placed in Curry’s work. The abstract dimensions, which often are misunderstood as an artist’s stylistic choice, are essential to the focused immediacy, the expressive relevance at the moment. Curry’s genealogy of creative influence indeed makes the case that abstraction is the catalyst for clearly distinguishing between the essential and the superfluous, enabling this young artist to put forth his powerful artistic expression.

More information about Curry can be found here. More information about Mestizo is available here.