Samuel E. Vázquez: How a firehouse became his canvas

Samuel E. Vázquez at the Indianapolis Black Firefighters Association headquarters at 1201 East 46th Street in Indianapolis wearing a T-shirt that he designed, evoking Black firefighter history in Indianapolis.

When the Indianapolis Black Firefighters Association (IBFA) president Corey Floyd wanted to turn the decommissioned firehouse at 1201 E. 46th St. into a museum, he knew who to turn to: his brother in law, Samuel E Vázquez.

Vázquez is an Indy-based artist, curator, musician, and graphic designer. He was familiar with the firehouse that serves as an IBFA clubhouse and food pantry because he helped serve food there.

 “It was three days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday,” Vázquez remembers. “And we served a lot of folks. Sometimes we were passing out like 200 meals every day.” 

He had started serving meals during the COVID-19 shutdown of 2020. He had just returned to Indy after a stint teaching at New York City College of Technology. 

After Floyd broached his ideas for the firehouse, Vázquez enthusiastically dove into the work.

“Sam helps make my ideas a reality,” Floyd says.

The museum displays are not yet finalized. But you can already see Vázquez’s work highlighting the storied history of Indy’s Black firefighters that dates back to 1876. He has also helped with the design of the IBFA website, their T-shirts, and their Black Fire Sweet and Spicy BBQ sauce, among other merchandise. 

All sales go to IBFA charitable causes.

Vázquez had spent a lot of time in the firehouse, using it as an ad-hoc studio for his more conceptual work. He clearly has a fondness for the place.

He also has a fondness for collaboration with designers and artists of all backgrounds.

During the COVID shutdown, galleries were disrupted because the physical spaces in which to display art were suddenly off limits. Vázquez saw the problem that presented itself for himself and other artists: No longer could you walk into fellow artists’ spaces anymore to see their work. 

So he began a magazine titled Offerta, that showcases the work of artists he had come to know and admire with photographs of selected works along with biographical information.  

Offerta, he notes, means “offering” in Italian. “This is an offering; a gift of art, and sharing it,” he says of his work as publisher and online curator. “The project is very rewarding as far as connecting with artists from New York, from Brussels, and from here.” 

Among the artists featured in Issue #3 of Offerta,  is Anila Quayyum Agha, no stranger to Indianapolis, whose work “Intersections,” a hanging cube with lightbulb in its center—casting shadows—is world-renowned. 

You’ll find a lot of intersections, as it were, in Vázquez’s career; between art, design, and history.

Vázquez was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1970 but grew up mostly in New York City, where his family moved when he was nine years old. They eventually settled in the Upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights.

His work on canvas speaks to the history of graffiti and style-writing in New York. In fact, Vázquez. who tagged subway cars as a teenager, is part of that history.

“The introduction to larger graffiti pieces is mainly tagging, just putting your name up,” Vázquez says. “You have to create your own style. It's like your signature. So your tag represents you and then you move on from there if you want to continue developing. Then you move on to doing walls or subways, roof tops, any place that you can put your name on.”

The ability to tag subway cars, according to Vázquez, was contingent on historical circumstances. That is, the 70s were a good time to be a subway tagger, as the police were preoccupied with other things.

 “New York's almost been bankrupt,” he says, harkening back to those circumstances. “The city laid off 7,000 police officers in 1977. This is the same year as the blackout. So the concern of law enforcement was not chasing kids writing stuff on a subway.”

But then Ed Koch was elected mayor in 1978, as the city was emerging from a debt crisis. During his time as mayor, penalties for graffiti toughened.  

“He made it his campaign issue to clean up the city,” Vázquez says. “So the penalty for getting caught writing went from a misdemeanor to now you get more time “By the mid to late 80s. a lot of us were like, ‘I ain't gonna risk it.’  Even if you are a minor. If you get caught, you'll spend three days in lockup.”

While Vázquez was never caught tagging subway cars, a friend of his was caught in the act of tagging school property while he was present.

In the aftermath, a schoolteacher who happened to be a dean, told him to take advantage of the courses that his high school, located in midtown Manhattan, offered. 

“I took some after school courses, art classes,” he says. “So through the after school program, we worked with computers. We also did some tours, to different businesses. And one of them being an advertising agency called Young & Rubicam. That's when I saw their art department. So I saw them sketching ads, with everything they use.”

He enrolled at New York City Technical College in Brooklyn in their art, advertising, and design program. After he moved with his family to Indianapolis in the early 1990s, he enrolled at the Herron School of Art & Design.

“At that time where computers were becoming more, more as a production tool in design and that he had the skills,” he says  “So a friend told me, ‘Try Herron School of Art. They have a computer class.’ And that was my whole idea, to just go in there, get a few computer classes, learn it, get into the field. But at that point, you had to enroll in a program to be able to even access computers and so I enrolled in the digital communications program.”

But it took him a long time, the better part of a decade, to earn his degree. 

While his commercial art and graphic design work reflects his course work, his fine art reflects his growing up in New York City among graffiti artists. But that doesn’t mean his art is a literal retelling of street art history. 

“So my first pieces were showing more of like the stop motion, almost like that 30-second memory in one frame,” he says. “So that's what I was just showing the energy, the immediacy of subway riding and how colorful it is. Movement. Rhythm. Colors.”

Eventually, Vázquez went on to focusing on evoking city surfaces where bills are posted and ripped off, or worn down by the elements, and then new bills are posted once again.

“It's still there like every phase that I put on the canvas,” he says. “It has the past layers.

“#53” by Samuel E. Vázquez Found materials and mixed media on panel, 48x48 inches

At the same time Vázquez was creating art—for a time he had a studio at the Harrison Center—he was also involved in various graphic design projects.

He also became a scholar-in-residence with the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute and a featured artist in the City as Canvas exhibition, which opened at the IMA galleries at Newfields in 2017. 

Eventually Vázquez came full circle when he was invited, in 2019, to teach at the New York City Technical College.

Wherever he finds himself, as an artist and graphic designer, he values his independence.  

“I've always emphasized to artists that the means are out there for you to do it,” he says. “I'm even at the point where I have resigned from the whole idea of having gallery representation. Because in that sense, if you can create your own ecosystem, you know—be your publisher, be the one who writes your own story, you know, put it out there—don't let somebody else define your work or want to put it in a certain category.”

This independence of spirit applies to all matters of representation:

“I was just talking recently to somebody and I said, ‘I don't consider myself a Latino artist or an African American artist, or an American artist, I consider myself an artist. So oftentimes, yes, I may not be included in certain shows that people might think just because of my cultures. But I'm good with that.” 

Lately, Hoosier culture has been on his palette, as it were. 

That is, in keeping with his role as a graphic designer for the Indiana Historical Society, much of his recent work has been focused on Hoosier history.

This includes his design of the book Sydney Pollack: a Subliminal Existentialist  by Wes D.Gehring (IHS Press, 2023)..The late director of Tootsie and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was born in Lafayette, Indiana.

Vázquez also designed the colorful fonts in the posters for the exhibit on Hoosier basketball player Chuck Taylor, at the Indiana HIstory Center. (The exhibit Chuck Taylor All Star, running through January 27, 2025, opened in March.)

The IBFA Firehouse Museum opening, however, is set for some time during or before the FDIC (Fire Department Instructors Conference) International convention, running April 24-29 in downtown Indy.

“This is one of the very few associations that has a museum with their history, one of the few in the nation,” says Vázquez. “Black firefighters, anybody from all over the world, will come.”