I was born in raised in South Central, Los Angeles.

Back in the day, I skated around the neighborhood and everybody in that group of friends had a dumb nickname and mine was just Germs.

I cut out stamps.

These sponges are all cut by me.

I get an X-Acto blade, carve around them shapes of germs, spray the canvas and I treat it more as a background more than part of the image.

It's just more a build up of texture.

I work with shapes, it's kind of like a freeway system.

Everything intertwines so as I'm painting, I'm conscious of what I want to pop, what I want to push back.

It's really unplanned.

I don't really like plan my artwork.

It's just more, it's very spontaneous like jazz music.

I just kind of feel it.

From one day to another I can work on a whole section.

The next day I can change my mind, paint right over it.

It doesn't bug me at all.

I like working it until it feels right.

Growing up in South Central, I did see a lot of violence drug use and stuff.

Art took me away from that.

It kept me from like doing stuff I wasn't supposed to do but my dad would throw away my paintings and my paint supplies.

It was in the backyard.

He thought I was just junk and trash.

He just thought I was just wasting time doing this.

This is not going to pay your bills but I was very persistent.

Later in life, he would actually ask me to send him pictures of me and Cheech.

He really was proud of me.

I enjoy the feedback I get from people looking at my artwork.

My job is to create it and the viewer's job is to interpret it.

There is no right or wrong way of looking at my work as long as I get some type of reaction or some type of emotion could be joy, could be just confusion, that's, to me that works too, you know.

I just have always been fascinated with the human face.

My style is expressionistic.

It lends itself to all the personality of the person that I'm painting.

I try to capture all of that and I always used the primary colors the yellows, the blues, the reds.

Using such vibrant colors is just embedded in our culture.

I come from a lineage of artists dating back to 1877 starting with my great-grandfather Juan Nepomuceno López who created works on paper, portraits and my grandmother Margarita Lopez also created portraits and still life paintings.

I was introduced into art when I was eight.

My grandmother sat me down to paint.

That was very intuitive on her end.

In high school, I entered into a contest.

I got first place and I was able to go to Pasadena Art Center.

I realized that some ways I was home.

I was an artist and that this was the beginning of my life.

There's something about having a piece of clay and to shape it and to mold it and building something with it and there's something so beautiful about feeling that cool clay in your hand.

My girl, my little baby.

I'm very inspired when I'm able to create ceramics or paint.

This is such a big part of my heritage and my family to continue creating art in a way that has integrity and love and passion for me is very important.

My artwork is a reflection, a visual diary of who I am, who I grew up with the people in my community and my neighborhood, East Los Angeles.

The Sears Tower has been like a beacon of light.

It's the last memory I have of my dad.

He passed away when I was very young.

He took me to Sears to buy my first video console but I was always driven to art.

I was always painting, drawing or making some craft and that's something that I credit a lot to my mom that as a kid she gave me a lot of independence and once I took my first painting course at Cal State Long Beach which was oil painting, I just fell in love with the medium.

I graduated from college and got hired at the Museum of Contemporary Art as a gallery attendant so I saved up to lease my first art studio.

These are the small pieces that are like items of my Mexican culture, from the ceramic skull pieces to the foods and one of my other series is called Homage to my Mother, which is a conversation that I'm having with my mom.

She was supportive but she's always very practical at the same time and she's like pointing out to artwork that she liked which was very decorative bouquet flowers and she's like why don't you paint that you know people like that kind of art.

That's around the time where she started her own business cleaning homes.

It's going well for her and so I took those 18th century paintings and I painted the vision of reaching for the American dream.

This is not only an homage to my mom but it's homage to immigrants that sustain their families.

In 2018, I feel stagnant.

I feel I'm not moving.

I was desperate to make a living off of art and I would often see somebody selling oranges at the exit of the freeway and I was just thinking about this I'm like okay I want to take that idea of selling fruit but make it art and I found this beat up fruit cart and turned it into a rolling music playing fine art gallery.

People would come up and say I thought you were selling fruit and I was like I am selling fruit and eventually people started picking up on it.

People that thought they couldn't buy art because it was expensive.

I like to think about it as a joyfully protesting the status quo and so I just felt like if I worked hard enough I would eventually get to be recognized.

The Cheech Marin Center gave me that platform.

That was like eye opening.

It changed my life.

I like this one here.

Everybody likes this one here.

Yeah, this is good.

In the past, the Chicano movement has been misunderstood because I think we are thought of in a stereotypical manner.

We as Chicanos just stayed strong in our beliefs and in our works and it has come to fruition when you have a museum who can show the diversity of who we are as a movement, as a culture and as artists.