Daniel Del Real: Highlighting the intersection of art and food at the Global Village Welcome Center
Daniel Del Real with his “No Seas Concha” at the Global Village Welcome Center
Daniel Del Real’s “No Seas Concha” sculpture, on display at the Global Village Welcome Center near Lafayette Square Mall, functions as a bean bag chair.
In English, the original title of the work literally translates to “Don’t be a shell” but its more colloquial meaning in Mexican Spanish is “Don’t be Lazy.”
It might make you want to sit down, but it could also make you feel very hungry. It is, after all, modeled on the popular Mexican sweetbread, the concha.
“Every time people come in here, and we talk and show them the Concha, we're like, well, 'You can go into any of these bakeries and pick up a concha,” says Del Real, who is the Welcome Center’s curator.
Conchas are available for purchase in several bakeries and restaurants within close proximity of the Welcome Center maintained by the International Marketplace Coalition (IMC), on Indy’s northwest side.
Read about some more of the IMC’s programming and history here.
The Welcome Center functions not only to highlight an extraordinary array of international restaurants and markets in close proximity to it, but also to highlight the vibrant cultures that created the cuisine. There are artifacts and art works from all over the world on display here.
The inspiration for his “Concha” sculpture, however, came from a distinctly American artist: Andy Warhol. When the Indianapolis Museum of Art (now Newfields) hosted the exhibition Andy Warhol Enterprises, which opened in 2010, Del Real took note.
“I was totally hyped to see it because I've always been a fan of Warhol,” he says. “But I've never really understood his work until I saw that exhibit. It showed you his art, but the focus wasn't the art itself. It was really how he capitalized on it. And it was a big mind-blowing moment for me when I saw that. And I was like, ‘Hey, I can do this.’ And so that's where the idea of this series called Giant Mexicanadas or Giant Mexican Things came to me.”
One of those Mexican things was a lotería card.
“It’s basically like our American bingo,” says Del Real, who was born in Tijuana, Mexico, but grew up in the United States. “But it's instead of the numbers—instead of calling out the letter and number combinations—it's just images. And these images have been in use since like the 50s, I believe. They're very classic images and they're still in use today. This is the same one that you would have purchased in the 1950s. And so it's a very iconic, Mexican pop item. So what I did was I got maybe a group of about 10 volunteers and said, ‘Hey, let's create a couple of Mexican bingo boards. These giant sized ones and we'll play it and people can put little Post-it notes when they hear their card getting called.”
His idea was to play Mexican bingo at the Indiana State Museum, where he has led craft workshops, on a grand scale.
“So I had them all paint these … 12 by 16 size canvas panels and then they created these big frames to put them in and basically created these on a large scale and that was the first giant Mexicanada.”
The second Mexicanada was the concha, but he didn’t get an opportunity to implement it until 2017, when the University of Indianapolis hired him to curate a show at their gallery, the Christel DeHaan Fine Arts Gallery. The title of that show, which featured 13 Latinx artists, was Herencia: Latin-American Influence in Art.
Del Real graduated from UIndy in 2005, with a B.S. in Visual Communication Design.
“I was working on that for about a month,” he says. And I really really rushed it. I was working so many hours on it while I was trying to coordinate all the artists for the show. So I was curating the show and also working on this piece.”
At that time, working from his studio in Lafayette Square Mall, he had to improvise due to budgetary considerations.
“I took a couple of queen size memory foam mattresses, cut them down into squares and stacked them together to create this big block,” he says. “And then I carved it into the concha shape then I made a cover for it. And then my friend Lauren [Ditchley] and I stitched all the little icing on top of it and stuffed it with polyfill that we took out of Goodwill plushies. “We basically just bought a bunch of plushies and ripped them open to take the polyfill out on because that was the cheaper alternative than going to Joanne's and buying a box of polyfill.”
That was the birth of the Concha, but it spent some extra time in utero, as it were.
“The Sunday before the exhibit was opening, I was with Mark Rucshman who is the director of the gallery and Unidy and I was working with him putting together that exhibit, hanging it up,” he says. “I was still stitching the icing on the freaking Concha the night before the opening, keeping Ruschman at the gallery until 11 p.m.”
He was really scared that he wasn’t going to be able to get the project done on time but he did.
At the reception, there was a local arts blogger who was present for the artists reception and she took photos of a lot of the pieces in the exhibit, including the concha, and posted it to her Instagram. It quickly got posted on a website catering to a Latino audience called Mitú.
“And they found that image and then made a meme that said, Yes, Concha bean bags exist,” says Del Real.
One thing led to another and the Smithsonian Institution, which was planning on opening its Molina Family Latino Gallery, sought him out.
“They found my artist page, Daniel Del Real Creative on Facebook, and sent me a message there. And they're like, 'Hey, we're interested in having your Conchas at this new museum. And can you please call us'.”
They sent Del Real a contract, and commissioned him to make four “Conchas”—“in different flavors too,” Del Real says— but they are smaller versions of the one that was on display at the UIndy Exhibit, 36 inches in diameter rather than 60 inches.
Read here about Del Real’s involvement in the Latino Artist Mentorship Program
This time, however, there would be no going to Goodwill to find plush toys to unstuff: the Smithsonian had very specific requirements as to what kinds of materials he could use to fill the soft sculptures. But Del Real had more time to put these conchas together, which was partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Molina Family Latino Gallery opened in June 2022, an event attended by the likes of President Joe Biden and guitarist Jose Feliciano.
But you don’t have to go all the way to Washington D.C. to check out Del Real’s “Concha,” as you can find it in the Global Village Welcome Center. Likewise you don’t have to go all the way to Mexico to eat a concha. You can find them at Mama Inez, Saraga International Marketplace, and Panaderia Artesanal, all within a few minutes’ drive from the Global Village Welcome Center.
Del Real’s favorite conchas comes from Panaderia Artesanal. “It's all in the name,” he says, “They're very artisan.”
“Lotería” by Daniel Del Real, on display at the Global Village Welcome Center.
