Mark Velasquez

Mark Velasquez (born August 2, 1977 in Santa Maria, California) is a Mexican American photographer and artist. Velasquez was recently selected to be a contestant on the Bravo reality show Work of Art.
Background
Velasquez was born and raised in Santa Maria, California. He learned how to engage the public and also perform in front of an audience while working every day after school in his family's restaurant.
After graduating from high school, Velasquez suffered a near-fatal case of diverticulitis, which required multiple surgeries to correct. Experiencing this at the age of eighteen gave him a level of maturity that focused him on his creative goals. The following year he moved to Seattle, WA, to attend Cornish College of the Arts.
Art
While at Cornish he developed technical abilities in many media including drawing, painting, sculpture, and multiple forms of printmaking. Velasquez's first experience with black and white photography was uninteresting as he preferred working with vibrant colors. His sculptural work evolved into performance art pieces, often presented in large public settings. In one year he performed on the streets of downtown Seattle as Jesus fighting the Easter Bunny on Easter Sunday, protested the protesters of the WTO summit in Seattle, and posed as Jesus for a bible book signing at the Seattle Public Library. These works strove to engage and entertain the public while at the same time presenting an ironic message, themes that carry through to his current photographic works. After a year of focusing mainly on performance art, he relearned photography in order to document his performances and the with the use of color film his love of photography finally began.
In his senior year at Cornish, Velasquez worked closely with visiting lecturer and renowned Native American performance artist James Luna. After graduating in 2000 he became Luna's traveling assistant, constructing installations and carrying out public performances of his own to open several of Luna's staged works. This not only lead to visiting and working with administrators at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Washington State University in Pullman, University of California at Santa Cruz, but also teaching week long installments about his own performance art at San Diego State University and Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. While Velasquez has fazed out his performance work he continues to work with Luna as a set and publication photographer, including several images that were used for Luna's show in the 2005 Venice Biennale in Italy.

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