by Jaime Longa, Visual Artist — San Francisco, CA Creator’s Fund Recipient
ABOUT THIS SHORT PROJECT
San Francisco-based Basque-American artist Jaime Longa is creating a series of 20 to 30 oil paintings chronicling the history and lived experience of the Basque people and diaspora. Working in archival-quality materials, Longa’s paintings are intended to endure — and to eventually be exhibited.
The series is deeply autobiographical as well as historical. Longa’s family roots trace back hundreds of years to the coastal town of Ea, Natxitua in Bizkaia, where the Longa, Olano, and Larrinaga families built seafaring and trade networks, eventually founding the Larrinaga Steamship Company. During World War II, his grandfather narrowly escaped execution by Axis forces in the Philippines after being mistaken for an American spy. The effects of the Franco regime’s persecution of the Basque people reached his family as well, resulting in the loss of Euskara fluency across subsequent generations.
Longa immigrated with his family to San Francisco in the 1970s and sees his art as a responsibility — to chronicle, honor, and transmit a cultural identity that perseverance alone has kept alive. The Creator’s Fund award offsets the cost of high-quality painting materials, allowing this working artist and father of two to continue creating work that moves audiences and speaks to Basques and non-Basques alike.
WHY IT MATTERS
Oil paint lasts centuries. That’s the point. At a moment when so much Basque cultural memory has already been lost — to war, to displacement, to forced assimilation — Longa is making work designed to outlive all of it. A painting on a wall asks something of a viewer that a history book doesn’t. It slows you down. It makes you feel it. For Basques who recognize the story, that’s affirmation. For everyone else, it’s an introduction they won’t forget.
SOURCES
Jaime Santiago Longa website