An Artist's First Teacher: Her Grandfather

Lucy Gellman File Photo. "Mother Divine" is pictured below.  

Inside the low lighting of Gather East Rock, the smell of coffee beans swirls through the air. Art adorns the blue walls, but one painting stands out among the others. The painting’s name is “Mother Divine,” by the artist Sarahi Zacatelco. The mother in question is a green woman, with plants and colorful flora adorning her head and water dripping down her neck.

In every brushstroke, Zacatelco pays homage to the man who taught her how to paint: her grandfather Agustin. 

Zacatelco is an activist and artist living in Fair Haven, where she has a dreamlike vision of turning the neighborhood into a mecca for public art. Whenever she finds a new canvas for an upcoming project, she reaches back to the roots of her family in Oaxaca, and the time she spent learning from her grandfather there. 

“He always was doing something,” she said in a recent interview at Gran Rodeo, a Mexican clothing store on Grand Avenue she frequents. “He was a writer, a singer, he played the guitar, and he was painting. He was always working with the arts.”

Born in 1982, Zacatelco learned how to create art from her grandfather in Oaxaca. The city, located in the southwest of Mexico, is known for its arts and culture, particularly textiles. At the time, her grandfather lived with her while her mother worked. Together, the two spent hours going out to the central plaza in ​​Juchitán, where she let her senses take over.

“You can see the food, you can see the food, you can smell it, you can see the lady selling flowers, you can see everything,” she recalled excitedly. When she was roughly six years old, “he gave me a piece of paper and watercolors and he showed me how to put the colors on it.” She hasn’t stopped making art since. 

Agustin Zacatelco and Zara Mejia, Sarahi’s grandmother, made chess pieces out of rocks and wood to sell. They also made Talavera pottery pieces with ceramics, which Zacatelco described as “a Baroque tradition" that one might see in old colonial homes. She no longer has any of her grandparent’s Talavera—“the tradition was lost due to being poorly paid and a lot of effort for each piece.”

The last time Zacatelco saw her grandfather she was 13. In the 1990s, her mother moved her children to Mexico City, then to the Bronx, and then to the Brownsville neighborhood in Eastern Brooklyn. The family moved to Fair Haven, where Zacatelco still lives, in 2001. She called it “the perfect place to raise two boys and two girls,” referring to her siblings—except there was one part of her life missing. 

Zacatelco’s mother decided to move her family to give them a better life. “My mom, she tried to move us on, and we left the house … It was no choice,” Zacatelco said. Her family did not keep any of her grandfather’s old art before he died in the 1990s.

But his artistic spirit did not die with him. Zacatelco carries on his legacy today with her prolific art, much of which is inspired by Frida Kahlo. It was part of her upbringing as a young adult in Spanish Harlem, and flows through public art projects at the New Haven Free Public Library and across the city. It even makes its way into her podcast, Mujeres Del Siglo XXI, which she records out of Baobab Tree Studios on Orange Street. 

“All my art is part of my life, from my grandfather,” she said. 

Henry Fernandez is a junior at Engineering and Science University Magnet School (ESUMS). His piece is part of our series "Welcome Home,"  in which alumni of the Arts Council's Youth Arts Journalism Program tell the story of immigrants and refugees in New Haven.