29 Facts About Mel Casas

Melesio "Mel" Casas was an American artist, activist, writer and teacher.

Mel Casas is best known for a cycle of complex, large-scale paintings characterized by cutting wit, incisive cultural and political analysis, and verbal and visual puns that he called Humanscapes, which were painted between 1965 and 1989.

Mel Casas' work has been collected by the San Antonio Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Mel Casas's work is held in national and international private collectors.

Mel Casas' "Brown Paper Report," written in 1971, is an important Chicano and American cultural document.

Mel Casas was born in El Paso, Texas to Mexican American parents during the Great Depression.

Later, Mel Casas was called into the United States Army and his father insisted it was his duty to serve.

Mel Casas served in the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, where he was wounded and subsequently awarded a Purple Heart for bravery in the war.

Mel Casas went to graduate school in Mexico, and he received a MFA from the University of the Americas in Mexico City in 1958.

Mel Casas taught art at Jefferson High School in El Paso, Texas for three years, where one of his students was Gaspar Enriquez.

Mel Casas served as president of the San Antonio-based Con Safo art group.

Mel Casas taught for 29 years at San Antonio College where he was Chair of the Art Department for 12 years.

Mel Casas enjoyed teaching a "very good cross-section of the city," but serving as chair was stressful, since he was often on call.

Mel Casas often paid a price for his trenchant social criticism.

Mel Casas was designated "Artist of the Year" by the San Antonio Art League for 1968, only to have this honor revoked three days later.

Mel Casas, who referred to the dominant notion of beauty as the "Barbie doll ideal," spoke of the privileges of blond hair and blue eyes while he undressed a Barbie doll during his San Antonio Art League lecture, which is why his award was taken away.

Mel Casas died in his home with his family and his wife of 35 years, Grace Casas.

Mel Casas was first recognized for his work in an abstract expressionist style, the "typical," dominant mode of painting in this period in the United States.

Mel Casas came to feel that his abstract work was too "pretty," and that it was an inappropriate artistic language for him.

Mel Casas began making politically themed paintings in 1968, and he emphasized this subject matter from 1970 through 1975.

Finally, from 1982 through 1989, the last group of Humanscapes treated what Mel Casas called Southwestern cliches.

The experimentation with multiple styles and techniques that Mel Casas utilized in his Art About Art series was continued in his Southwestern cliches.

Mel Casas utilized jars, squeeze bottles, barbecue skewers, and chopsticks.

Mel Casas followed McLuhan in regarding anonymity as a hallmark of the mass culture that characterized modern life.

Mel Casas painted more than 600 paintings after the Humanscape series had come to an end.

Stylistically, Mel Casas continued where he had left off with the Southwestern Cliches, since most of his post-Humanscape paintings were made by pouring and dripping paint.

Mel Casas never cared very much about marketing or selling his art, because his income came from teaching.

Mel Casas clearly was in tune with the art movements of the 1960s, and had mastered formalism, Pop art, and conceptual art by the end of that decade.

At the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Mel Casas: Human featured six Humanscape paintings and eight of Casas' art boxes.