Friend works to keep Petaluma artist Hamlet Mateo’s work alive after his death

On a serene Thursday afternoon in Beth Tisthammer’s art studio in Petaluma sat stacks of plastic storage containers full of her friend’s artwork — by the local artist Hamlet Mateo, who died last year.

“He’s gone, but his artwork has kept him alive,” Tisthammer said as her eyes softened.

Since Mateo’s death at 48 of a heart attack in September 2021, Tisthammer and Jill Plamann, a local retired gallery owner, have organized and documented over a decade’s worth of his artwork — pen-and-ink drawings, stamp pages, installations, sculptures and comics that tell Mateo’s story of grappling with race, immigration, mental health and his identity as a Dominican-born queer man.

In August, the Museum of Sonoma County accepted his artwork. His art will exist there forever for the community to explore.

“He’s a part of Sonoma County history now,” said Plamann, who displayed Mateo’s work for more than a decade at Healdsburg’s Hammerfriar Gallery.

With his family of four, Mateo immigrated from Santo Domingo to the Bronx in 1987 when he was 14. There, he attended LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and then Antioch College in Ohio to study film. He eventually returned to New York, then made his way to San Francisco and finally, in 2004, to Sonoma County.

Although the artist had support, his journey wasn’t easy. Over the years, he experienced racism, harassment and homophobia, according to Plamann. He also had a complicated relationship with his family.

“If you were gay in the Dominican Republic, which he was, you probably wouldn’t have made it to adulthood. You would’ve been ridiculed and tormented. These experiences formed who he was,” Plamann said. “He had a message. You felt his work; you participated in his thoughts and feelings.”

His fantasy Caribbean island

Mateo was driven to make art and give shape to his creative spark from the time he was a child in the Dominican Republic.

As kids, he and his friend Veronica Cordero created a newspaper to document their neighborhood’s buzz. They charged 10 cents a copy, just enough to buy pineapple pizza and Coca-Cola. Mateo insisted the newspaper included an arts section. At their homes, they created movie scenes using figurines and puppets.

“He’s always been extremely creative” said Cordero, who now lives in Virginia. “He always wanted to be a movie director.”

The two crawled through each other’s windows to hang out and jumped onto neighbors’ rooftops to pull mangoes and guavas off their trees, she remembered.

“He was the one person that made my childhood like a fantasy” Cordero said during a video interview last week, speaking through tears.

In his adult years, too, Mateo challenged reality. He dreamed up a fantasy Caribbean island called “Mongo” which was made of two islands — Santo Domingo and New York City. As a teen, he carried both islands with him, Tisthammer said, but he could never bridge them. Neither felt like home.

Mateo chose the name Mongo because it sounds like “mangú,” a Dominican dish of mashed plantains. Mongo became a unifying theme in all his art.

“As I started to look into his work about Mongo, I started seeing undercurrents of colonialism and what it felt like for him to come from a place that was dramatically and horrifyingly changed by the arrival of Christopher Columbus,” Tisthammer said. “I started to feel the intergenerational trauma in his work.”

His island came to life through maps, stamps and ’zines that represented the rituals and history of Mongo’s indigenous people. He played with different mediums. In live performances, he interacted with his art installations displayed at Healdsburg’s Hammerfriar Gallery.

Making art inclusive

What moves Tisthammer until this day is how inclusive Mateo’s art is. You don’t need an art degree or need to have the right answers while observing his art, she said.

“He didn’t have any preconceived idea about what you’re supposed to see in his work” Tisthammer said. “He wants you to bring your own interpretation to it. That’s him saying, ‘You don’t have to be smart enough or know so much about art to get what I’m doing. You just have to be a human being.’”

In the fall of 2021, mutual friend Rick Carpenter reached out to Tisthammer and told her Mateo had died after a heart surgery. With his family’s blessing, she began sifting through his work at his Petaluma apartment. She found drawings intermixed with mail and spent time poring through boxes of artwork, some of it undated.

In August 2022, Mateo’s family traveled from the Dominican Republic and the Virgin Islands for his memorial at the IceHouse Gallery in Petaluma. The seats were filled with artists, past colleagues, collectors, family and friends who had come to celebrate his life.

After the memorial, Mateo’s family met at Tisthammer’s art studio to look through his work to decide which pieces they wanted sent to them.

“When I was packing his work, it felt like I was sending the rest of his body home,” Tisthammer said.

But some pieces will remain here. At the Museum of Sonoma County are his pen-and-ink drawings of his “Early Man” comic, which explores colonialism and is full of military-jacketed colonialists, animals and shadowy humanoids. Also at the museum is “Throat,” a dark yet vibrant anatomical series of drawings featuring people and throats that examines his experience as a young man with a high-pitched voice. Other work at the museum is from his “A Peaceful Adolescence” series, exploring a child’s point of view and the early stages of human development.

“There are more stories of immigration and the minority experience than what is typically represented in our community,” Tisthammer said. “I hope the young people who seek out his work are inspired to add their voices to the cannon in a way that’s authentic and brave.”

Mateo’s legacy

In August 2022, Tisthammer and her family journeyed to Occidental’s Grove of Old Trees with a symbolic body of Mateo they had created from ribbon and colorful fabric, echoing the artist’s practice of creating bodies from various materials. They paraded it through the redwoods and placed it under a Gravenstein apple tree.

With Mateo’s family, Tisthammer plans to promote his artwork at ’zine festivals and ’zine-making venues to help support young people in finding their own narratives.

“He put everything he went through into his work,” Tisthammer said. “I hope when people see his art, they’re inspired to do the same.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mya Constantino at mya.constantino@pressdemocrat.com. @searchingformya on Twitter.