By Dr. Miguel Juárez, University of Texas at El Paso
and Dr. Chon Noriega, School of Theater, Film and Television, UCLA
Native El Pasoan, experimental filmmaker and educator William “Willie” Varela passed away on February 24, 2024, at the age of 74, due to a long-term illness. He was born in El Paso, Texas on January 8, 1950. He graduated from Jesuit High School in Spring 1968 and enrolled at UTEP in the fall that same year. While pursuing his undergraduate degree in Secondary Education, he worked as a radio announcer at Radio KAMA and at KINT and began making films. He graduated from UTEP with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1976. In 1996, he earned a Master of Arts degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Texas at El Paso. He subsequently taught filmmaking at UTEP for nine years from 1997 to 2006.
During his lifetime, Varela exhibited in major museums and film centers, produced over 100 experimental films and 30-40 videotapes, numerous installations, and thousands of photographs over his career. Willie Varela’s papers are archived at the Stanford University Libraries in the Department of Special Collections and his films are archived at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
Varela considered himself a self-taught artist or an autodidact. In the early 1970s, he was inspired by two artists he read about who had turned to experimental film as an act of defiance: ex-Beatle John Lennon and visionary filmmaker and polemicist Stan Brakhage. Varela would get to know Brakhage, who remained “a good friend and mentor” until his death in 2003. Varela’s work came to fruition during the Chicano Movement when activists thought film should be documentary and narrowly political. According to Writer Robert Chavez, “for a Chicano filmmaker to produce underground films during this period, was ground‐breaking.” In 1982, Varela and his family moved to San Francisco, California, where he became a part of the strong experimental film community there. They moved back to El Paso in 1985.
Varela first exhibited his work in 1979 at the Cinematheque in San Francisco, with subsequent exhibits there. He also displayed work at the Pacific Film Archive, at UC Berkeley; at the Museum of Modern Art; at the Cineprobe (a film series at MOMA in New York City); in a one‐person show in 1988; and in the 1993 and 1995 Whitney Biennials, a major showcase of cutting-edge American art. His work was also featured in a mid-career retrospective curated by UCLA professor Chon Noriega at the Whitney Museum in Spring 1994.
Varela was an artist and advocate for film as a form of personal expression. Throughout his career, Varela published many articles in film and arts magazines such as Jump Cut, The Journal of Film and Video and many books. In the early 1980s, Varela also created venues for bringing experimental filmmakers from across the U.S. and abroad to highlight their work in El Paso, including an experimental film series at the El Paso Public Library.
In the last decade, he had been hosted by newer generations of university student organizations who discovered the cultural treasure he represented. In 2013, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center produced a two-disc DVD compilation titled “Video Art by Willie Varela” that spanned four decades of work as part of their Chicano Cinema and Media Arts Series. His last showcase was in March 2023 at the Aurora Picture Show, a Houston non-profit media arts center.
Varela is preceded in death by his parents Jesus Varela and Delia Rodríguez and is survived by his daughter Marisol Varela, brother James Varela, his wife Frances, and their family. He is also survived by his two former spouses, Rebecca Mares, and Jan Jones. Visitation services will be on Wednesday, March 6, 2024, at 7 p.m. with burial on Thursday, March 7, 2024, at 10 a.m. at Mt. Carmel Cemetery. Services are being handled by Hillcrest Funeral Home.
Click here to read our 2020 interview of Willie Varela
About The Authors:
Miguel Juárez, PhD, an artist, curator and author and past editor and contributor for El Paso News, has been involved in the arts in El Paso, Texas since 1985 when he and artist Paul H. Ramírez, co-coordinated “Juntos 1985, “1st Hispanic Art Invitational Art Exhibit,” at the Lincoln Cultural Arts Center Gallery, in El Paso, Texas. Juárez was also part of the Texas Steering Committee for the “Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (CARA)” exhibit, which opened at the UCLA Wight Gallery Center in 1990. From 1989-92, Juárez was enrolled in the (MA) Arts Administration program at CSU at Domínguez Hills, in Carson, Calif., with concurrent enrollment in the Museum Studies Program at CSU Long Beach. In Los Angeles, he interviewed numerous Chicana/o artists. In 1997, Juárez co-produced, with EPCC-TV producer Gabriel Gaytán, an interview series titled: “Frontera Artists: Mexican and Chicano Artists of El Paso, where he interviewed 17 Chicana/o artists. In 1997, he also published the book: Colors on Desert Walls: The Murals of El Paso (Texas Western Press), with photographs by Cynthia W. Farah. As a former academic librarian/archivist Juarez has helped to collect and archive important collections at the University of Arizona; at Texas A&M University; at the Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) at UCLA; and at the University of North Texas. Juarez is an adjunct instructor in the Department of History; the Humanities Program; and in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of Texas at El Paso; and in the History Program at El Paso Community College.
Chon A. Noriega, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of Film, Television, and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work explores Chicano and Latino arts through their aesthetic, social, and institutional histories. He is author of Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema(2000), and co-author of Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement (2008) and Home—So Different, So Appealing (2017). Noriega has edited the collected writings of Carmelita Tropicana and Harry Gamboa, Jr., and, most recently, co-edited Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (2019). Noriega has actively archived the works and papers of individual filmmakers and artists, art groups, and community-based arts institutions. He is currently completing preservation of the 1950s and 1960s films by Destructivist artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz (b. 1934).
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