Art is all around us and can be known for its enjoyment, expression, textures and sometimes shock. People use art for creative expression and to communicate, while others use it for therapy or to relieve stress, anger, or other emotions. Art can be found in many careers such as fashion, architect design, or photography. It is also used in marketing and graphic design. Nowadays, art has many digital uses as well through the creation of websites and mobile phone applications.
Dixie Salazar, a local Fresno artist said, “Each artist is trying to solve a problem or problems that relate to their own particular obsessions.” Salazar has been doing art for more than 40 years. She is a multitalented artist who works with several media including oils, collage, watercolor, painted collage, assemblage and photography.
Salazar’s work has been featured extensively on the West Coast, in cities like San Francisco, Las Vegas, Merced, locally in Fresno, and even New York. Her paintings have many colors, different combinations of forms, and provocative abstraction, according to her website.
For Salazar, creating art is almost a world with no meaning but has to do more with the emotion built into the piece. “Time has almost no meaning when I’m working,” she said. “Often I don’t feel pain or hunger, it is much like a meditative state, but I’m fully aware.”
In addition to being a successful artist, Salazar is also an accomplished writer. She published her first novel, “Limbo,” in 1995, along with three volumes of poetry the same year.
In 2006, over 25 youth began participating in weekly after-school writing workshops where they congregated in the hallway of a two-story building in West Fresno and learned the essentials of creating media and telling their stories. The group evolved over the next five years and is now proudly recognized as The kNOw Youth Media.
Through our program, we create opportunities for our youth participants, who in turn create long-term positive change in their communities. Our approach weaves youth development and youth media innovation to produce our biannual youth publication, multimedia projects, and community forums.
The kNOw began as a project of New America Media, which was the country’s first and largest national collaboration and advocate of 2000 ethnic news organizations. In 2018 The kNOw became a project of Youth Leadership Institute.
