Salvadoran-born Victor Cartagena has been making art in the Bay Area for more than a decade. The work that Cartagena produced in the early to mid-1990’s battled with memories of the violence in El Salvador and the pain and separation that he experienced in relocating to the U.S. Cartagena has moved beyond solely articulating the immigrant experience and tackles numerous social issues in the U.S. such as consumer culture, homelessness, and material waste. His artistic palette has also branched out to include sculpture, audio, and video. Using time, space, and seemingly incoherent mechanisms, Victor creates unions between symbols that function at a practical level to inspire the viewer to question cultural, economic, and political topics as they relate to issues of individual identity. He was a joint recipient of a Rockefeller grant with Octavio Solis and Larry Reed for Shadow light’s production of The Seven Visions of Encarnacion produced at the Brava Theater Center in November 2002. Cartagena received a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation 2001 Visual Arts Purchase Award, the competitive Art Council award in the year 2000, and 1996, and 2000 Pacific Prints awards. Cartagena’s work is in numerous private and institutional collections, including the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii, The Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii, The Oxbow School of Art, Napa, CA & the Collection of Egnatia Odos in Thessaloniki, Greece.