Names: Avelino Santoyo, Gerardo Zambrano, Arsenio Baca, Sea Sevilla, Natalia Corazza
City: Monterey County
Contact: @avelsanher @gi.zambrano @abacaart @artdesevilla @naticorazza
Medium: Mural Work
This is the accidental birth of “La Neta” mural team in 2020, as told by Gerardo Zambrano
Mexican Artist and Former August 2019 Art Battle Champion Avelino Santoyo was commissioned to paint a mural at the MHAA: Salvador Dali Museum in early June and asked me to help along with Arsenio Baca (originally from the SF Bay Area). I call it an accident because I hadn’t pictured myself painting murals before this. I mean I like painting large paintings, but I thought murals were still unattainable or a daunting venture. At any rate, We finish The Blue Mural and cut to June 27th at a Seaside Pop-up festival, me and Avelino meet a female artist in a Navy Blue Jump suite with an animated personality and an embroidered name tag with the letter “C”. Sea Sevilla was her name and she showed great interest in collaborating with us on our next Mural project eventually titled “Paradise Lost” (outdoor Ceiling). Sevilla had previously worked at the Monterey Sculpture Center in Sand City and has an extensive knowledge in that field creating molds/to casting bronze/ as well as many patina techniques. Subsequently, we soon find out she was solely responsible for awarding me with a 2nd place ribbon for an octopus sculpture at a seaside Exhibit where she was one of the judges that year.
Back to the ceiling Mural, Two weeks prior to finishing, I received a message from another young Female Colombian Artist Natalia Corazza who had just finished art school in San Francisco and had just moved back to Monterey to find local art collaborations. She identified herself as the sister of Caterina who was an Art Battle Finals runner up at our February 2020 event. So She jumps onboard late in the Ceiling project but quickly produced some very colorful quetzal Birds with Avelino’s Guidance who was the visionary of this project.
We then move on the Next mural titled “Project Caterpillar” at Counterpoint Coffee shop in Seaside. Mind you, up till then I was just captioning “the Dream team” on social media solely on the fact that we had an immensely talented cast of individuals and the Michael Jordan ESPN documentary was hot at that quarantine time. So we soon saw the value in our way of sharing ideas and bringing them into the physical world and with fast execution and we knew we want to create more murals. So we had lunch and conceived a new name that for an obvious reason that ‘the dream team” is over used and vague. Also we are all Latino, we conceived a universal Spanish phrase used by the average Raza. We shot out upwards of 20 other names and why we chose said names but we’ll save that story for another day. “LA NETA” according to Urban dictionary means “for real?” as a response or to a statement or “for real!” as to affirm a statement and second definition is what we were interested in but also because it sounded cool. So that’s the origin and the rest is History….