Last Friday, RiverArts celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month with Artistry of the Latin American Diaspora, a gallery event alive with color, music, and conversation featuring two beloved local artists: painter and musician Fredy Granillo and fine furniture maker Bob Ortiz, who shared stories of their creative journeys and how they sought to braid their heritage with the aesthetic of American culture.
The event was hosted by Guy Hutchison, president of the RiverArts board, who opened the evening with a reflection on the power of connection.
“Talking about human diversity can feel fraught these days,” Hutchison began. “But in my experience, when you walk with someone and listen deeply to their story, you discover the interconnections that bind us—like a thousand trees whose roots are entangled in common ground.” He then read a poem by the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton: “I believe the world is beautiful, and that art, like bread, is for everyone… and that my veins don’t end in me, but in the unanimous blood of those who struggle for life.”
It was an apt invocation. What followed was an informal talk about weaving of lives, heritage, and aesthetic.
Ortiz reflected on growing up as the only Puerto Rican family in a working-class Irish Catholic neighborhood. “If you’d asked me ten years ago how my heritage shaped my work, I might’ve been stumped,” he said. “Like a lot of first-generation kids, I just wanted to fit in. I wanted Coca-Cola and English, not Spanish and arroz con gandules.”
As he matured, though, he began seeking the culture he once pushed away. “I’ve spent my life walking in two worlds, trying to find where I belong—as an artist, as a craftsman, as someone between supposed opposites.” This search drew him toward Shaker furniture and the aesthetics of Asia, which, like his own roots, prize simplicity and quiet strength.
Ortiz described his shop as not just a workplace but a gathering place: “I wanted to create a space where you don’t have to buy anything to belong—where you can just walk in and feel like you’re part of something.” For him, relationships are as central as craft: “The wood is sensual, yes—but what keeps me going is the relationships that come from the work.”
Granillo, by contrast, came of age amid the turbulence of El Salvador’s civil war. “I was born in 1982,” he said. “My father was in the army. My mother cleaned houses. We moved constantly. Soldiers on one side of the street, revolutionaries on the other. I remember running all the time.”
He spoke of mango trees, of friends scattered by violence, of fragmented memories. “When I paint now, I’m not thinking of those times directly,” he said. “But they’re inside me. My life was turbulence. Painting came when I finally found peace, here, in Chestertown.”
Granillo’s work, bright and open to interpretation, resonates far beyond the Eastern Shore. Visitors from Syria, Brazil, and across Latin America have stood before his mural on Ortiz’s shop and said, That looks like home. “I love that,” Granillo said. “I’m not trying to paint ‘El Salvador.’ I’m trying to offer color and balance—Latin American expression—in a place that needs it.”
Granillo is also an accomplished potter and painter of hand-crafted Talavera ceramics whose bright lines reflect his large paintings of El Salvadorian neighborhoods. His ceramaic masterpieces, along with his paintings were on display at RiverArts.
What threads Ortiz and Granillo together is more than heritage, it is mentorship, trust, and affection. When Granillo first arrived in Chestertown, Ortiz gave him a key to his shop and encouragement to keep creating. “He pushed me,” Granillo said. “First a neighbor, then a friend, then like a father.”
“I’ve been lifted by others’ kindness all my life. It feels right to pass that on,” Ortiz said.
Hutchison closed the evening by noting how our culture often tries to put people in boxes, even well-meaning boxes like “Latin American Heritage.” But the conversation had shown something else: identity as process, not category. “Latin America isn’t one thing,” Granillo added. “Even for me, it’s complicated. Each country, each person, so different.”
And yet, through their work and their friendship, Granillo and Ortiz have created something beautifully simple: a space where difference becomes connection, and where art, like bread, is for everyone.
The exhibit will be on display until Sept. 27, with a performance by multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Verny Varela on Sept. 26.
More about RiverArts may be found here.
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