Articles Stevon Lucero

Colorado Artist Stevon Lucero
by Miguel Angel Castro
9 News Article ©January 25, 2002
From an early age, Stevon Lucero viewed things in life with a profound sense of spirituality and symbolism.

While growing up in the city of Laramie, Wyoming, Stevon Lucero remembers being very inquisitive and curious about spiritual themes. He began exploring the perception of reality and similar subjects.

During his high school years, after deeply concentrating on these themes, Stevon was seeing everything in a metaphoric way and was applying symbolism to practically everything around him. "I was a Symbolist without even knowing," Stevon remarks.
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Visions on Canvas
by Renee Fajardo ©2006
Read Five Magazine Article Issue 8
“Heaven is before you, but you can not see it. It is obscured by your vision of hell.”

Stevon Lucero is an artist. He has been painting what he sees, hears and experiences for nearly forty years. Five hundred years ago when the Spanish Conquistadors brought their priest to the “New World” (Mexico) where Lucero's ancestors were born, those like him would have been embraced with an open fire pit. That's what you do to heretics. Even by today's standards, Lucero could be considered a very dangerous man. When folks in Denver refer to him as the visionary Chicano artist, they aren't just whistling De Colores .
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Art for Life
By C.J. Janovy
Originally published by ©Westword 4-29-1999
The television is on, transmitting images from the Columbine High School shooting into the front room of the Lucero studios, at West 33rd and Tejon. The walls are covered with the blood reds, dusty blues and luminous golds of Stevon Lucero's and Arlette Lucero's artwork. Even after Arlette turns off the TV, she sees the connection between the electronic pictures from the other side of town and the paintings on her wall.
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A Breakthrough Exhibit at Museo
Renee Fajardo ©2006
Originally published in La Voz
If Chicanos have never left Aztlan, then it is because Atzlan evolved and progressed. In this context, the art in the show begins to take on a new meaning. Lucero's stunning and never before seen modern Aztec codice, Xocotl, perhaps embodies the spirit of the show most perfectly. The piece is about sacrifice and giving of one's self without fear. If we have not left Aztlan it is because we have made certain sacrifices and done so willingly.
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Viva Chicano History
By Susan Froyd
Published in Westord ©Thursday, August 5, 2004
Though Lalo wasn't a fine artist, his spirit will certainly fly through the room Friday when the Old Timers..? Show opens at CHAC, now settled as a gallery on Santa Fe Drive, where it long stood alone, preceding the current influx of art venues in the neighborhood. Featuring works by six original CHAC artists -- Ernie Gallegos, Stevon Lucero, Jerry Jaramillo, Al Sanchez, Carlos Sandoval and the late Fred Sanchez -- who are linked together by their participation in a mural project dubbed "City Walls," Old Timers is an art exhibit on the surface, but a slice of history deep inside. CHAC, originally a multi-arts forum for Chicano literature, theater and fine art, coalesced shortly after these artists' work on the short-lived communal mural project ended, hampered by politics and a lack of funds.
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Stevon Lucero Awakens Universal Consciousness for All
by Renee Fajardo ©2006
Photos by Todd Pierson ©2006
Artist Interviews Magazine August 2006
Lucero, who was born in 1949, grew up in Laramie Wyoming amidst Wild West cowboys and Mexican rail road workers. He lived on the “wrong side of the tracks” where life was marked by poverty, violence and alcoholism. “We were just poor Mexican kids living in a redneck town” laughs Lucero. “I didn't even know I was a Chicano, a Mexican /American, or about my cultural traditions then. I was just trying to survive.”
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Paint the Town Brown
For these Chicano artists, home is where the art is.
By Harrison Fletcher
Article Published in WESTWORD ©April 24, 2003
At CHAC, artists have tackled everything from AIDS to homelessness. In 1992, Manzanares started the Chile Harvest Festival, which for five years featured traditional colonial art from New Mexico and southern Colorado, including santos, tin work, retablos and weaving. Later, CHAC invited taggers to create aerosol art and featured the Día de los Muertos altars of former gang members. CHAC has displayed everything from ironing-board saints to velvet Elvis paintings, from grandmas' pot holders to erotica exhibitions. And although this openness has led some critics to question the quality of the shows, others see the eccentricity as a strength.

"The people who are involved now are like the people who were involved initially," says Stevon Lucero. "It's an act of love."
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Museo Provides Showcase for Lucero's Challenge to Viewer
By Mary Voelz
Published by The Rocky Mountain News ©June 9, 1996
Not quite surreal, not quite real, this is what artist Stevon Lucero calls meta-realism, his personal shorthand for the words metaphysical, fantastic and realism.

The Museo chose to feature Lucero, director Jose Aguayo said, as a sort of contrast to the Martinez retrospective last summer, a show fierce with pride and prejudice. Martinez's stylized depictions of everything that goes into the Chicano heritage draws heavily on cultures that came before.
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An Artist of Unique Vision and Perspective
By Don Bain
Published in La Voz ©September 10, 2003
Stevon Lucero has followed the path of a true artist most of his life, over thirty years of it in the metropolis of Denver. He has produced a prolific body of work in three different styles” Neo-Precolumbian, Representational, and Metarealism.

Lucero was born and raised in Laramie, Wyoming in a family far removed from the typical Latino experience and community. Asked about his childhood, it becomes apparent he walked an arduous path in early life, but looks back upon it with a philosophical perspective. “I had friends, but I was a lonely kid. I can't say I was unhappy but just kind of dazed and confused. There was a lot of pain in my life,” he said. But he credits the difficulties of his youth as the source of the creative muse within him. “The great thing about art – it becomes a vehicle - to use art not just as a creative process, but as a way of resolving those energies within you. Art becomes the process by which you reveal these truths unto yourself and liberate yourself. Liberating yourself allows you to truly heal.
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Background for Aztec display is a work of art all by itself
Steven Rosen; Denver Post Art Critic
Published in the Denver Post ©August 18, 1992
By the time the exhibit "Aztec: The World of Moctezuma" opens Sept. 26 at the Denver Museum of Natural History, Stephen "Stevon" Lucero's monumental mural of a crowded Aztec marketplace will be visual background.

In the foreground will be three-dimensional educational props - mannequins, and re-created Aztec baskets, fruits and vegetables and agricultural products. All that is what's known as "foreground." The foreground and painted background together form a diorama - a specialty of natural history museums.And after the show concludes on Feb. 21, his work very probably will be destroyed. Since it was painted on Sheetrock and Masonite, attached via screws to a metal framework at its corners, removal will be difficult if not impossible.
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Two Muralists Paint their own Heritage
By Joe B. Verrengia News Science Writer
Published in the Rocky Mountain News © May 6, 1992
Murals:Their artistic styles couldn't be more different, or their inspirations more alike.

Across the hall, muralist Stevon Lucero acts as if he's having a seizure.

His graying hair flops against his shoulders. Paint is smeared on his thick arms and the apron covering his belly. He strides back and forth the 20-foot scene of the bustling central marketplace, or tianquiztli, dabbing colors here and there on life-sized sketches of 125 Aztecas.

In Lucero's mural, farmers have spread their produce on the Aztec market's vast courtyard of hardpacked clay. They squat shoulder-to-shoulder with traders peddling exotic wares from the corners of the empire, as well as barbers, potters, weavers and porters for hire, creating a din that could be heard miles away. Towering above the market are the splendidly geometric twin temples of fire and rain, and beyond them the rugged mountains.
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Painting beyond mind, body, soul
by Cristina Frésquez
Published in El Seminario ©January 11, 2007
Local Denver artist, Stevon Lucero, has been creating soul captivating visuals for 40 years, transporting people to his world of visions and enlightened thought. Since childhood, Lucero has experienced intense dreams and visions, venturing more then once into separate realities. Through these revelations and studies of metaphysical, philosophical, and historical books and tapes, he has been guided to create two unique art forms: Metarealism and Neo-Precolumbian art.
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Greeley Exhibit Showcases Culture
Rocky Mountain News ©April 25, 1993
The art of Stevon Lucero, a prolific professional artist whose credits include a mural at the recent Aztec exhibit at the Denver Museum of Natural History, is currently on exhibit at Michener Library on the UNC campus in Greeley. Also on display are the works of University of Northern Colorado faculty members Roberto Cordova and Genie Canales.
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Lucero Paints Powerful New Visualizations
Published in El Semanario ©May 2, 1996
In human psychology and in contemporary art, there is an area between the purely abstract and the purely realistic. This is the area in which Denver artist Stevon Lucero maneuvers, exploring the edges of his subconscious mind where thought begins to intrude on the real world. Out of images seen in dreams, visions and separate reality experiences, Lucero creates powerful painted metaphors.
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Teaching Spirituality through Art
By Toni Fresquez
Published by El Semanario ©February 13, 1997
When his career as an artist began, Lucero decided that whatever he decided to do in life, he would be the best at it. “One of the thing's that I was dealing with when I became an artist, as a young Chicano, you would look and never see ‘us,' we are marginal people – it's a white man's culture,” explained Lucero. “And I said whatever I do, I'm going to try to be so good at that, so I could break those barriers. Although it seemed egotistical in some people's eyes, my objective was to discover something in art - develop that, go through the process – the mythic process of which society puts you through – which I have lived and you have to have the intellectual construct – and the validation is your experience. If you can survive that and jump the right hoops in the mythic proposition, then you are allowed a place in history.”
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Denver honors 150 ‘unsung heroes' on sesquicentennial
Stevon Lucero is one of the unsung
by Alan D
Rocky Mountain News ©November 22, 2008
In celebration of its 150th birthday, the City and County of Denver has selected 150 of its citizens to honor as “unsung heroes” – ordinary people who have done extraordinary things to help make Denver a better city for this and future generations. And lists 150 Wonderful Things About Denver.
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Urban Nature: A collision of environments
By Cristina Fresquez
Semanario ©8/9/08
The Denver Botanic Gardens brought has found a way to merge the expression of street art with the beauty of nature though their 2008 signature exhibit, “Urban Nature”.

Another local artist selected to display artwork was metarealist artist Stevon Lucero, who has two works on display, “Gift of Corn” and “Scarlet Maiden”, which are located in the Sacred Earth Gardens.
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¡La Revolución! celebrates Mexican Revolution with art, dance
By Karissa Conard
UNC Mirror ©11/21/08
Thursday, the anniversary of the launch of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, was the day of "¡La Revolución!" from 5:30 - 8:30 p.m. in the UC Ballrooms, held by Nu Alpha Kappa fraternity. The event included an art exhibit by Denver Chicano artist Stevon Lucero. His art revealed many themes of sadness, but also embodied God and the universe. Latino pride was a theme for all works of the night.

"I'm inspired by the fact that we are perceptive beings," he said. "You reach a point where you've been through so much: the love, the heartbreak, the process of being. With everything you learn, it just adds to that need to create. Every artist discovers this."
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