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Hugo Claudin at Artside Gallery
12/22/25
text by Jaer Medina
text by Jaer Medina
Demoralization soon set in after the third locked door we encountered. All but one were closed by 4:15 PM. As we aimlessly walked, I noticed some CDJs proudly displayed in an unmarked storefront. Behind them hung a series of large-scale paintings of women in luchador masks, a visual language so associated with Hugo Claudin my knee-jerk reaction was to say his name out loud without thinking. As we shivered in front of the window talking about Hugo’s work, a man from the back of the gallery waved us in. He introduced himself as Lucius McColgan, the founder of Artside Gallery and close friend of Hugo.
That evening got me thinking about the history of South Division’s art scene and the ineffable role Hugo has played in that history. For the better part of two decades, Hugo has run Mexicains Sans Frontières (MSF), a multimedia alternative art space in his loft above Artside Gallery. The space shifts between music venue, gallery, occasional art market, and other art related gatherings. This breadth of activity mirrors Hugo’s own artistic practice, which moves fluidly between visual art and music.
As someone deeply interested in alternative art spaces, learning about MSF has been especially compelling to mull over. Not to mention that Hugo is one of few Mexican-American artists to have established an art space in West Michigan – something I think is important to recognize amidst recent events.
Our conversation unfolded with the same restless range as Hugo’s art practice, rooted in the history of Division Avenue before expanding into the myriad of influences behind his multi-year painting series, Women on the Verge of Kicking Your Ass.
Jaer Medina: Hey Hugo, thanks for being down to chat. Could you tell readers where we're at currently?
Hugo Claudin: Well, we’re at Mexicains Sans Frontières. I've been here since 2006, so twenty years.
JM: I see that you've got a bunch of music equipment and fun stuff out. Could you talk to me about the history of MSF and some of the things that happen here?
HC: When I moved in here, I literally had a light bulb and a radio. Like, I was homeless. Part of this was following the Richard Florida model: insert an artist in a disenfranchised zone and the hope is that tattoo shops, coffee shops, Otoños (a local coffee + vintage shop), and Nidos (vintage store) would surge, right? But throughout the time that I've been here, the road has been closed like seven times. They dig out and take out the pipes, and everybody moves out because there's no way to do business. There's no walking traffic, and essentially there were all these little galleries that come and go.
Basically, my life before here was renting a room, renting a place where you could paint, and then renting a place where I could play music, because usually one wouldn't allow the other. I had been at Kendall [College of Art and Design] and got my scholarship defunded by President Reagan and found myself dropping out. That was prior to this [MSF], and then somebody tapped me in the community and said, “Hey, we're looking for artists that are looking for art space.” Of course, I was the brown figure in the granting process, and somebody tapped me and said, “Hey, this opportunity is coming up, heads up.” And I was like, “No way. Low-rent lofts for artists? Get the fuck out. In Grand Rapids, really?”
And then I got in. I don’t know how, because I didn't have a bank account, I didn't have a phone, I didn't have an address, I didn't have shit. And I was like, “There’s no fucking way.” And then I was accepted. Right around the same time, I got hired at Spectrum Health as a community health worker.
My world changed completely. I had been a punk, a bum, you know. I was doing the underground thing after I left Kendall. At that time, I felt like there’s gotta be cool people somewhere in this fucking hole, like at least one, right? And I just got into the downtown scene, which was super different from having lived in Eastown, Wyoming, and Caledonia.
Caledonia was the place I arrived in in 1980, and my surroundings were like a Norman Rockwell painting. That was my vision of America in 1980, having come from Guadalajara, a modern city. Then I'm in a cornfield and a centennial home. Then John Lennon was shot, and that was like, “Welcome to America!” “Here’s what we do to artists,” kapow! So I was terrified. There was stuff like the AIDS epidemic, too. Reagan came out and said something like, “If you're not a fag or an artist, you really don't have anything to worry about.” He literally said something to that effect.
Around that time, being an artist in Grand Rapids, people would often ask, “What do you do?” And I'd say, “I'm an artist,” and people would go like this [fellatio motions]. That happened right up to when ArtPrize started, and people go, “No, that's not true!” And I’m like, “Yes, it was true!” It happened many, many times. People thought it was a “faggy” job to do. You could get a job doing interior decoration or maybe cutting mat boards. Those were our jobs back then.
Or you could get hired at this place just down the corner that had licensing from Disney to make junk T-shirts and onesies and all that stuff. You could get a job there as an artist, or you could get a job on Bridge Street making neon signs. Those were your options. And then at Kendall, once a year, Hallmark would come by and say, “We’ll offer you a job for ten bucks an hour,” which was a lot at that time, but you were enslaved to Hallmark all summer in some place out in who-knows-where Kansas.
So I tried doing the opposite, which was me observing how other artists lived. Now, mind you, from Fulton Street down to Burton Street, everything was boarded up. That was because of the riots [of 1967], but I didn't know anything about the riots. I didn't know anything about redlining. I didn't know why Division Avenue was called Division, and I happened to be on it. I didn’t learn about redlining until I did a play for a lady at Calvin University.
I'm telling you all these things because all of that is essential to here, [MSF]. I started out here looking for the underground, the “Bohemian lifestyle” or whatever. There were a couple of artists that lived across the street who were squatting, living hardcore lifestyles, making paintings out of fabric they found on the side of the road, dismembering furniture and making stretchers out of that stuff. Real hardcore artists, making their own pigments, making dyes and all that shit. I was really impressed by it, but they were literally starving artists.
Before moving to the States, I'd say, “I wanna become an artist, I want to paint,” and people would go, “You're either gonna go crazy,” or “You're gonna starve to death.” I was like, “Oh, I have a dark future.” [Laughs] So I thought, okay, I'm gonna learn from the people that know how to do it. But since I got a job at Spectrum, I could actually afford to live here.
I consulted with Tommy Allen [a Grand Rapids artist] and was like, “Hey, I'm in this really weird situation.” The funding is shady. They had also promised that after seven years they would sell me the place. I thought, as long as I don't get fired from my job at Spectrum Health, I should be gold.
Tommy was involved in decision-making at these lofts. I wanted to start curating shows here in this space. I had been curating at a coffee shop, doing music, where I got really lucky, too. I got super cutting-edge art and music because I met the right people. I never had to make a phone call ever again. Tommy said, “Yeah, dream big and do whatever you want.”
This was around the President Bush era. They were first starting the immigration nonsense on Fox News. It started getting heavy with that language. So that's why I called it Mexicains Sans Frontières—as a fuck you.
I decided to do jazz programming and art shows here. I lived here three years before other artists started moving in because people were afraid to move here. This was “Crack Corridor.” This particular corner had been like that thanks to former Governor Engler. He closed all the psychiatric wards and dropped them off here on this corner. That was around the time I was the punk hanging out here at the Enclave Café.
JM: One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is the tension between public and private areas, particularly for Mexican-Americans. I feel like we have an interesting relationship with that split. MSF is a case study for this, in my opinion, because you have all of these events that happen here, but you also live here, right? Could you talk a little bit about the ways your Mexican heritage has informed this space?
HC: My mom always had an open-door policy at our house. We didn't really lock the door or the gate. That wasn't a thing. My mom's Avon lady was a man. It wasn’t weird.
We had wealthy people that would visit my dad and poor people that would visit my mom, and we were just in the middle of it. We weren't wealthy. Everybody thought that because my dad was a gringo, he was wealthy. So all the time, home was a space where people were coming and going.
My dad was in the music scene, and there was a newspaper in Guadalajara called The Colony Reporter, and he'd get interviewed about his days in Los Angeles. I didn't know that upbringing was uncommon. That's what I grew up in. I kind of do the same thing here.
Although I do have to tell you, for my first show, people were gonna be invited to have free tacos. Then I was gonna put a gate at the door because I stole a chain-link fence off the street when they blocked off the road. I was gonna put it at the front door and stop people and say, “I'm sorry, you're not allowed to come in,” and only let people of color through. That was my attitude at the time.
JM: Around what time did that idea bubble up?
HC: Around 2006, 2007, 2008. Now, after 15 or 18 years of programming, Jack Smith played here. He’s an avant-garde saxophonist, and he told me, “I really wanna thank you for having a liberated arts space.” It never occurred to me that I had a liberated arts space because I didn't have the vocabulary to describe it. I didn't have a gallerist or know all the fancy key terms you need for grants. That’s why I did the NONLA grant reviews—so I could learn the vocabulary and keywords they want to see.
But I think the funding is getting smaller. The minefields are bigger. Who knows who's reporting to what? Is DOGE there? Is DOGE not there?
I started getting paranoid about what checking all those boxes means. I've mostly survived doing commissions. If I do public art, it's through a town or organization rather than an arts council.
JM: The impetus behind this whole conversation was running into your current exhibition at Artside Gallery. Could you talk about the series Women on the Verge of Kicking Your Ass, specifically where that came from and how it's developed over time?
HC: Originally, it was a personal story because my ex sort of whipped me around. I was going through a situation, and it kind of became part of the lovemaking, but it was on the borderline of being abused.
I had a dingy studio nearby where I would do a lot of stuff that was more underground, for friends or for fun, or for kicks more than anything. In Grand Rapids at the time, if you knew one artist, you knew them all. You’d go to a party and you could find all of them. If the CIA wanted to bomb the “radical left,” it’d be over.
With all the chaos happening at the time, it was purely coincidence that my ex was modeling in skates and a wrestling mask, and the whole thing just came together. I had admired the work of Pedro Almodóvar, especially how women are central to his stories, as opposed to Hollywood stories where the guy just drives off into the sunset with a blonde. In Almodóvar’s work, the men are mumbling fools. They’re idiots falling to pieces. The movie that inspired Women on the Verge of Kicking Your Ass was Almodóvar’s movie Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. I lifted the name from that. Do you remember Guillermo Gómez-Peña?
JM: Sounds familiar. I don't know that I can recall.
HC: He was an art, performance writer. Him and Coco Fusco were famous for doing the indigenous people cage thing.
JM: That’s right!
HC: He wrote a book called The New World Border. All the Latino cholos that are here were like, “Hey, check this out.” Like, this is really cool. And I was working at Schuler Bookstore, right? And I opened the box and I was like, “What the fuck?” Gómez-Peña was wearing wrestling masks with mariachi outfits and all this stuff, and his interviews were hilarious.
I thought his work was lit, and I really loved the book. It was kind of like all these amalgamations. Then I met a lady who was a bodybuilder, and I told her I had this idea to do women in bikinis and wrestling masks with high heels—seeming super aggressive—and she was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.”
So yeah, I just started. Then I got the idea for all the neon colors and went to antique shops and started buying colors that matched. Eventually, I started doing exhibitions and group shows. There was a big show Kendall put together called Pulso.
JM: Was that the one curated by Salvador Jiménez-Flores?
HC: I think so. I remember that one. I was part of a couple other things, too. Basically, a few group shows and small solo exhibitions and collaborations. We’ve done them at bars, art markets, whatever.
JM: One of the defining qualities of this series is not only how large the paintings are, but also the iridescent colors that activate under black light. Could you talk more about your material choices in Women on the Verge of Kicking Your Ass?
HC: They’re DayGlo paints. In the ’90s, I used to hang out with this guy who played guitar and was a film student. His apartment was lit similar to how the light hits the plants here. We'd get high and change the light bulbs and entertain ourselves just messing with colors. I just kept going with it.
I was also influenced by Pedro Almodóvar’s movies. Have you seen any of them?
JM: No, I don’t think so.
HC: The colors in his movies are on full dial. If David Lynch has it at three, Almodóvar has it at eleven. I decided to paint the walls of MSF with similar colors. Then I had a bunch of paint left over and started using it for the paintings.
Around that time, Arthur Danto had written After the End of Art. He was basically saying that self-aware paintings were a window to the end, or something along those lines. I internalized it subliminally and realized I had perpetuated Danto’s idea—paintings inside of other paintings.
JM: Okay, last question, because I know you’ve got rehearsals in a bit. Let’s say you had all the money and support in the world to bring an idea to life. What’s something that’s been on your mind that you’d like to see come to life?
HC: Your question comes at an interesting hour because somebody just offered me that. But it comes with a “but.” And the “but” is the trick.
A guy can give me the space and carte blanche to do whatever I want, but it’s a shelter for cats and dogs. That’s where the money would come from—adopting pets. I met this guy through ArtPrize. He’s actually one of the few guys banned from ArtPrize [laughs].
I originally met him across the street at the Enclave Café, which I’ve talked to you about many times. He wants me to recreate that ’90s scene we had. Honestly, I’m a little too old to deal with that kind of insanity. We had an open-door policy. Sometimes people who were really unwell would walk in. They’d mop the floor with urine or just sit and stare at the wall, and it’d be like, “Oh, that’s just how Johnny is.”
I don’t know that at this age I could do that. I don’t have the energy.
There’s also an opportunity with The Lit being open here, formerly the Ladies Literary Club. They’re really nice ladies, very open—although they already told me no to an event I proposed. I want to do a series of black-and-white photographs taken down here at a place called the Reptile Bar. That was the most out bar in Grand Rapids history.
That was the CBGB. That was our cultural center. You’d see doctors, lawyers, hookers, artists, pimps—all in one room. Every color, every shape. It was great. The programming was nuts, too.
I’d like to do something like that again, where I’m in charge of programming: music, art, locals, nationals, internationals, extraterrestrials—
JM: Aliens, right? [Laughs]
HC: Aliens, yeah! It’s an interesting time for me. People always ask, “Why don’t you go to LA?” or “Why don’t you go to New York?” I’m the king of the block here, so why would I want to do that? I was like, “Fuck it.”
They’ve tried to evict me multiple times. I’m on 119 noise complaints already, and I’m ready for more.
JM: Thank you for chatting, Hugo.
HC: Thank you. I hope we can chat more soon.