Santa Rosa’s retiring Mario Uribe leaves legacy of inspiration

It’s natural to want to leave your hometown looking a little better than you found it, but few people have found a more visible way to do than artist Mario Uribe, but he didn’t do it alone.

After nearly 19 years as leader of the Artstart public art and apprentice artist training program, he can point with pride to some 50 murals, more than 150 decorative benches and numerous other artworks scattered all over Santa Rosa, all created by aspiring young artists under Uribe’s tutelage.

An artist never truly retires - one can follow the creative impulse for a lifetime - but Uribe stepped down in late January as creative director of Artstart.

“I’m 75, and I still have a big bucket list of my own art projects that I want to do. I have ideas and files full of old notes that I’ve been writing for the last 20 years,” Uribe said, relaxing for a moment in his art studio on Art Alley, just off A Street in Santa Rosa.

“I think I’ve done Artstart long enough,” he added. “I been sort of wanting to retire from it for a few years, but I hadn’t found anyone to take over what I was doing, with the same kind of experience.” But now, Jennifer Tatum - a 1985 bachelor of fine arts graduate in ceramics from Sonoma State University, an art teacher and a working artist with her own studio in Petaluma - has been named interim creative director of Artstart, insuring that the program will continue, said Artstart Program Coordinator Suzanne Saucy.

“Jennifer Tatum has been working with us a couple of years as a lead artist for Artstart,” Uribe said. “I’m sort of on the periphery now of Artstart. If they call me and ask me a question, I’m happy to give them an opinion, but I’m really stepping back.”

Asked to sum up Uribe’s contribution to the Artstart program, Tatum put it simply: “Artstart is, and has been, Mario. Mario is like 10 people in one. He has vision, compassion, focus and talent. He holds the bar high for all those who follow his lead,” Tatum said.

“The question is: What is Artstart now, as we evolve. We are at ‘Begin Again,’” she added. “Our mission is to provide job training and mentoring, and foster life-changing breakthroughs by way of stimulating experiences in the arts of Sonoma County youth. We plan to build new teams of artist to move the mission forward.”

Notable Artstart projects include mosaic panels on the bench at the Children’s Memorial Grove at Spring Lake Park, installed by a team of apprentices last summer with guidance from Uribe. But Uribe is most proud of the apprentices themselves.

“We’ve had 300 or more kids go through Artstart. I don’t think we’ve anyone who became famous yet, but we’ve had quite a few who went on to get degrees and are working as artists and or teaching,” he said. Success stories include former Artstart apprentices Adam Rosendaul, who now has a Bay Area company that conducts art workshops for corporations, and Chandra Woodworth Crane, now a muralist and artist working for corporate clients in Phoenix, Arizona.

“Everything great at Artstart came through Mario,” Crane said. “He changed Santa Rosa through his art projects. He is fearless. Mario would just get up on your scaffolding and work on a mural with you. He’s a real mover and shaker in that community.”

Crane, now 34, started working with Artstart in 2001 as a Santa Rosa High School student, first as apprentice, then as an assistant and even filled in for Uribe as creative director at one point before she moved away.

The program’s greatest value, Crane said, is giving young artists practical experience, particularly in learning to negotiate with clients, either private patrons or public sponsors, who commission works of art. That training, above all, proves useful an artist pursuing a professional career, she said.

But to Uribe, the benefit is mutual, with the program nurturing both student and mentor. He said he found the youthful outlook of his Artstart helpers inspirational.

“Most important to me is all that I’ve learned from them,” Uribe said of his many proteges. “Now I try to look at things without thinking too much. And it has been rewarding to share my experience and knowledge,”

Although many in the community might assume that Uribe created Artstart, he’s quick to set the record straight: His wife, Liz Uribe, and Eleanor Butchart came up with the idea in 1999.

“They asked me to help them with the logistics, and how to set it up,” Uribe said. From that point on, he found himself in a leadership role, coaching teams of young artists, one of whom was usually designated as lead artist.

But Uribe’s local art achievements aren’t limited to his work with Artstart. His own projects include a memorial monument in downtown Santa Rosa honoring Sonoma County’s military veterans, and a mural in Santa Rosa’s Roseland district, inspired by the 2013 fatal shooting of 13-year-old Andy Lopez.

For the 13-foot-tall “Guardian of the Creek,” a statue of a rainbow trout, Uribe collaborated with the late sculptor Daniel Oberti, and hired some Artstart apprentices on the side as aides.

Now that Artstart is in good hands, and ready to go on without him, Uribe has other plans as a painter and sculptor, he said.

“The direction of my own artwork changes and evolves, as it does with most artists,” Uribe said. “But I have stayed during the last 30 years with the circle as a theme. I don’t get tired of that and I probably will continue with it.”

The artist will still maintain his A Street neighborhood studio but hopes to sell the building to the Imaginists theater collective, which has long occupied the front of the structure, facing Sebastopol Avenue.

Uribe’s other interests include the Sonoma County Matsuri Festival, an annual local salute to all of the Japanese arts that he founded, to be held again this year at Santa Rosa’s Juilliard Park in May.

Uribe is of Basque descent and grew up in Baja California, establishing himself as an artist in the San Diego area before moving to Sonoma County in 1995. His father was an importer of art from Japan and China, a background which Uribe says continues to shape his work to this day.

“I am deeply influenced by Zen Buddhism - stay in the moment,” he said.

You can reach staff writer Dan Taylor at 707-521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @danarts.