AXEL LIVES! Luke Gabriel Meraz Memorial Endowed Scholarship

The Luke Gabriel Meraz Memorial Endowed Scholarship was established in 2020 by ArtCenter Spatial Experience Design faculty member and father James Meraz, in honor of his son Luke. Luke was a unique artist who explored his vision through environments, repurposed assemblage art, character designs, illustrations, graphics and recycled fashion. Luke also created AXEL, an alter ego, and neo-cybernetic rebel who appeared in many iterations of his graphic novel and imagined environments.

In the spirit of AXEL, this Scholarship celebrates and supports the self-proclaimed rebel, out-of-the-box thinker, the misfit, the freak, the underdog, the uniquely multi-disciplinary designer who has no boundaries or edges, and feels limited by thriving in just one discipline.

Learn more about this scholarship at the Axel Lives website here: https://www.axellives.com/

Learn more about James Meraz by listening to the March 2022 ChangeLab Podcast: JAMES MERAZ ON CREATING A PATH THROUGH UNIMAGINABLE LOSS *https://www.artcenter.edu/connect/dot-magazine/articles/change-lab-54-james-meraz.html

A PORTRAIT OF AXEL
We shall recall your exuberance when troubled,
so to summon the courage to endure.
For the grief we are subjected to can only be remedied by your presence.
The solidarity of our woe
proves the permanent bonds of friendship.
If you look down upon us now,
we stand under the torch of your undying essence,
The light that has accompanied us thus far,
and shall continue to do so.
Some faces to recognize
and others to commit to memory
all of whom share their love
in beholding your radiance.
In blackest smokestacks,
and towering industrial complexes,
in a tangled culmination of chain link and wire,
a sullen evader traverses the grounds of progress.
He speaks an uncanny truth that I have followed for many years.
And now I must make my own way.
I can finally see beyond my present grief
I make my way to embody thy image.
BY JOE NUNEZ