NewsTaco

By Yesica Lopez,  NBCLatino

Friends of the American Latino Museum are letting you decide what their 2013 will look like.

The second annual Campaign Design Contest has announced the five finalists. “We are proud to unveil the 2013 Campaign Design Contest finalists and we want our supporters to pick the winner. Their votes will determine our next design, so I encourage everyone to go to AmericanLatinoMuseum.org and pick for their favorite,” said the Chairman of the board, Cid Wilson.

Anyone can vote for their favorite design until April 25th.

The winning design will be the feature image of Friends’ national campaign 2013; the winning artist will travel to Washington D.C. to expose their work and take a role in the historic campaign to build a National Museum of the American Latino in the Capitol.

The National American Latino Museum is still years away from being built and there is plenty of work to be done, but the campaign will help to raise awareness about the museum.

In 2008, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, the former president George W. Bush signed the act of commission to study the potential creation of a National Museum of the American Latino and since 2009 the commission has been working hard, traveling around raising awareness on the importance of creating a museum to celebrate the history of the Latino community in the United States, a museum by and for the people that will showcase American Latino art and culture.

This article was first published in NBCLatino.

[Image by  Gene Jimenez]

Although collaboration between institutes can sometimes prove a treacherous affair, the current collaboration between Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City only proves the converse. Namely, that collaboration presents curators with the opportunity to pool resources, forge distinct dialects of taste, and get down.

A good team effort between curators at like-minded institutes can even rewrite the narratives of artistic movements, ensuring that rosters don’t get myopic, or biased toward a gender, ethnicity, or culture. As an institute, it is clear LACMA is reaping the benefits of collaboration as evidenced in “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States,” but also their “ASCO” exhibit, a collaboration with Williams College Museum of Art.

Meandering through the several salons it is plain to see that the curators, Ilene Susan Fort and Tere Arcq, had the type of fun typically reserved for kids in a candy shop — in many ways, the exhibition borders on the manic: 175 pieces of art spread out over 48 artists. And yet, I could have lost myself in parsing another 175 pieces of art with relative ease. The exhibit affects a re-writing of Western surrealist history by infusing herstories of North American surrealists from (roughly) the 30s to the 70s, it ensures that the role women played in the Surrealism movement doesn’t get vandalized by chauvinists, or downplayed and mingled with the feminine imperative of the muse.

In many ways this exhibit is a dare to scholars and critics that might choose to suppress the seminal influence painters like Dorothea Tanning and Remedios Varo had on the verve of the Surrealist movement in the Américas. The works by Frida Kahlo in the “In Wonderland” exhibit at LACMA are well worth the price of admission; they spangle the middle of the exhibit, like stuffed grizzlies. But, the competing compositions of other painters ensured I was actually able to see them with factory-eyes. To believe one exhibit can be represented by one painting or one painter is folly; the real gem of “In Wonderland” is the veritable feast of paintings by lesser-known (but not necessarily, minor) women in the Surrealist movement.

An exhibit like “In Wonderland” reprioritizes the largesse of peripheral artists like Remedios Varo. She was a Spanish Surrealist painter that exiled herself in Mexico at the height of her career; her paintings are brazen, figurative compositions of almost psychedelic, paranormal tableaus. In “Papilla Estelar,” a maiden churns stars into a pablum she feeds to an avian moon-man; in “Mimetismo,” a woman figure has been sitting for so long that she’s literally become a part of the chair which made me think of a short story of Cortazar’s “Continuidad de los parques” (“Continuity of Parks”).

An added benefit is that the curators transcend the limitations of genre, media, and artifact by including a bevy of titillating sculptures. There are two sculptures (imperceptibly placed) by Louis Bourgeois that completely obliterated my synapses. “Portrait of C.Y.” (1947) is a slender totem, painted white, with roughly thirty nails hammered in on top of each other to resemble a mouth. And, “Persistent Antagonism” (1947) is a sleek, two-toned, spear-shaped sculpture that stands miraculously on its handle. The pieces stand on their own, but surrounded by the other treasures in their immediate air space, they took on an almost primal backglow.

[Courtesy Photo]

“Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World,” a current exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, represents an intricately choreographed dialogue between several players in pre-Columbian history. Primarily, the exhibit examines two of the largest empires in the pre-Columbian world: Inca and Mexica (or Aztec), through the artifacts they left behind. But the exhibit also traffics in depictions of the arrival of Cortés and Pizzaro by Spanish artisans.

So, viewers can expect to see a fuscia feathered, Incan ceremonial coca leaf satchel alongside a 15th century Mixtec mask of gorgeous turquoise stones.

Artifacts from both cultures are displayed simultaneously; there is no “us” and “them” designation. The viewer is allowed to understand the prowess of power that made them empires without losing sight they were both inhabitants of América. The exhibit also exudes the comparative splendor that occurs when institutes collaborate and allow curators free reign to render our understanding of the past. All in all, the exhibit contains approximately 200 objects: paintings, sculptures, codices, manuscripts, queros (ceremonial drinking vessels), and featherworks. The exhibit’s strength, however, comes from the levels and layers and locus of pieces in the exhibit, and not necessarily the volume.

The emphasis “Contested Visions” places on unique and aesthetically-charged objects prompts viewers to look wisely. For example, the exhibit includes a sculpture of Xiuhtecuhtli, the Aztec god of fire and heat. The glass-encased sculpture, no taller than two feet and no wider than two feet, exudes a malevolent bent, enhanced, no doubt, by red-pigment accents on his fangs and portions of his headdress. Xiuhtecuhtli is often depicted as an old man, and something about the way it sat, arms-folded-on-knee, in the corner of the glass casing made him all the more menacing and memorable.

Moreover, the exhibit does not reduce the players in América’s history to conquered or conqueror; instead, because the artworks are embedded in their context, viewers can enjoy pieces aesthetically, while at the same time building meaning from the piece. Curated by Ilona Katzew, the department head of Latin American art at LACMA, the exhibit tenders six integral sections that explicate the social and political hierarchies inherent in the Aztec and Incan Empires. Eclectic to the core, the exhibit has a kid-in-a-candy-shop feel, but there is nothing childish about the resources of the partnering institute: the Mexican Institute of Anthropology and History, or Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH). Indeed, the collaboration creates a conversation in which the voices of all participants carry the same weight.

The exhibit is not anti-colonial, or pro-conquest. Emphasis rests on the importance and singularity of the object, and how well it serves to illustrate greater concepts of “cultural negotiation, mutual accommodation, and exchange, a dynamic that gave rise to vital works of art.” Curated in a way that allows each artifact to wield an influence, it seems as though Katzew took great pains to include long-forgotten artifacts that resonate with meaning. For example, there is an attractive Testerian catechism in the exhibit, a sequence of images that missionaries used to inculcate the idea of western religion into the belief system of indigenous peoples. Further on down the rabbit hole, there is an illustration of Tenochtitlán on the back of a folding screen from the 17th century next to an oil-on-canvas genealogy painting of a double wedding in the early 18th century.

Contested Visions ensures there’s room for multiple perspectives and ideologies.

["Folding Screen with Indian Wedding and Flying Pole (detail)" Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art]

Albuquerque, New Mexico — Walking into the Torreon at the National Hispanic Cultural Center (NHCC) in here is an unexpected, yet awe inspiring experience.

From your first steps into the tube-shaped building, you find yourself unable to focus on anything in particular, as any of the thousands of colorful details on the fresco mural covering the entire inside of the structure demand your attention. Whether it’s the matachines or the conquistadors or the scholars, babies, agriculture, immigrants, cave paintings, animals or mythology, somehow, you think that if you stare at it long enough, you might be able to take it in all at once.

“When I walked in here and they said, ‘This is the wall you can use, paint whatever you want.’ I thought I was a candy store,” said the mural’s artist Frederico Vigil, a painter and fresco artist who is well known in the Albuquerque–Santa Fe area.  This fresco is the largest concave fresco in North America, and it was painted by a Latino and about Latinos.

A native of this region, Vigil told NewsTaco that he had but one idea in mind in 2002 when he first began work on the fresco at the request of the NHCC.

“I thought about mestizaje — what makes us who we are,” Vigil told us, And also shared an anecdote to this end.  “The Mexican Museum of Art in Chicago, I tried to get in there, but I wasn’t ‘Mexican enough.’ So are we too Mexican? Are we too black? Are we too Hispanic? Are we too Anglo? We are mixed. So anybody who says ‘You are not Mexican enough, you can’y show my Museum‘ —  what do you mean, I’m from New Mexico, how much more Mexican can you be?”

And the mural itself does a pretty good job of tackling the subject. Vigil started researching the mural in 2002 with the help of a team of five scholars, while he began the initial plaster coats of the fresco; one must apply five coats before getting to this stage whether rough draft of the painting may be applied. Final approval for the design took two years and seven months and the mural was completely finished in February of 2011.

One might wonder, what took so long? But as was alluded to earlier, not only the forms, but the sheer scale of this particular fresco is pretty awesome. Contained in it, are horses whose faces are as tall as your average NewsTaco editor; other figures range from 5 to 9 to 12 feet tall. This only makes the process Vigil utilized to create this work of art all the more interesting.

Essentially, Vigil divided the 4,000 square–foot fresco into quadrants, or slices of pie as he told us, and divided each quadrant with a painted column and into each quadrant painted a particular homage to Latino cultural heritage in the United States. The four quadrants are broken down into: Iberios (Spain), Mesoamerica (Azteca, Inca, Maya, etc.), Southwest Pueblos/Camino Real and U.S./Nosotros. Each quadrant tells the story with historical figures, action sequences, symbols and mythical representations about how, say, the Mayas’ use of wheels for toys is interrelated to their use for transportation in Europe. Or, as Vigil said, “We are all the same.”

There is so much to see that a visitor surely must either go more than once, or spend a good chunk of time trying to cull as much as possible in one visit. Did you see the oldest cave painting from Alta Mira? What about the ant that represents Quetzalcoatl? Did you see the Jewish philosopher? Vigil worked with the aforementioned scholars to ensure that each image on the fresco was factual, and now that the mural is completed, he’s not looking to start any new projects more grants, but hopes that visitors enjoy the message of mestizaje for one principal reason.

“I think what we’re showing here is how interrelated [we] are,” he said, standing at the center of the tower, looking at his work. It eliminates a lot of the discriminations we have, I have it, everybody has it, that’s the way we grew up. I guess what I’m saying here, is that we are all interrelated.”

[Photos By María Elena Álvarez]

“ASCO: Elite of the Obscure” is a new exhibit slated to start on September 4 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, representing a watershed moment in the history of plastic arts for Latinos, and for Latino Angelinos in particular, as all four members of the collective, Willie Herrón, Harry Gamboa, Patssi Valdez, and Gronk, grew up on the streets of East Los Angeles.

The currency of the exhibit is decidedly photography; four large salons contain large prints of the performances the group used to mount on the streets of East Los Angeles like “Stations of the Cross,” “Walking Mural,” and “First Supper (After a Major Riot).” So, don’t come to this exhibit because you like the work of Diego Rivera, or because you find murals titillating. Come because you believe in the intersection between activism, democracy, and public art.

In a 2007 interview conducted by L.A. Weekly, Gamboa says he was instrumental at Garfield High in the East L.A. high school walkouts of 1968, and participated in the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War in 1970. In fact,the collective and the group’s name — asco, as in disgust or revulsion — is a response to the disgust and nausea that Gamboa felt in 1972 when he visited LACMA and realized there was no paintings by Chicanos in the museum. In many ways, the “art” in “Elite of the Obscure” becomes the process through which the viewer recreates the performances ASCO staged in 1972 to bring to light many of the inequalities suffered by Latinos, despite major contributions to the infrastructure, history, and economic well-being of the U.S.

Supposedly, on that day in 1972, Gamboa hunted down the curator and asked them about the lack of Chicano art on the walls, to which the curator replied, “Chicanos don’t make art, they join gangs.”

Asco is also what many people felt after seeing the performances of the collective. In a way, the exhibit is also a watershed moment for the museum; LACMA is the same museum Ed Ruscha depicted smoldering from the back in his painting “Los Angeles County Museum on Fire.” Certainly, the argument could be made that LACMA’s collection has decidedly become less Anglocentric since Ruscha’s painting, and decidedly more inclusive. 2010’s popular show, “Phantom Sightings,” also curated by Rita Gonzalez, surely proved what can happen when the museum bets on ethnic. Furthermore, LACMA sees the group worthy of a retrospective is indicative of a growing trend among museums to accession rare, esoteric materials outside the established canon which includes graffiti and aerosol paintings by reputable graffiti “writers.” The popularity of documentaries like, Exit Through the Gift Shop is also testament to this aesthetic.

“Elite of the Obscure” adroitly displays the documents of ASCO’s publications, performances, and “no movies.” The original collective’s output was not what you might call prodigious, but they were all driven by an ethos of revulsion at the stereotypes and the idiosyncracies of Latino culture; the only evidence, for example, of their performance for “Stations of the Cross” is a series of photographs snapped by Seymour Rosen. “Elite of the Obscure” includes several issues of Regeneración, the magazine the collective produced. Several issues of the magazine are laid out on display boards, like specimens; mock-ups, galleys, and flyers are displayed as well. Regeneración served as a mast for the collective’s endeavors at the onset of their trajectory, and special care is taken to display these objects. Do not come to this show expecting to see paintings and sculptures of Chicano art; instead, you get the photographs of the performances that the collective expressed, nothing more and nothing less.

The exhibit is curated by Rita Gonzalez, LACMA’s curator of contemporary art, and C. Ondine Chavoya, associate professor of art and Latino/a studies at Williams College; and, the exhibit travels to William College after it’s run at LACMA.  Elite of the Obscure is proof that even the most Anglocentric institutes can get it right, and display the wide range of artistic accomplishments and registers that may come from any ethnicity.  Come to this show because you find esoteric work sometimes more satisfying than paintings fetching millions; come to this show to see a piece of Los Angeles that doesn’t exist anymore, and a piece of Los Angeles in a future where Latinos are the majority minority and in control of the message that gets out.

[Photo By LACMA]

A national museum that honors Latinos in this country will probably not be coming anytime soon, according to a New York Times report. Sadly, the reasons the federal museum is having trouble getting off the ground are similar to the reasons Latinos have a hard drive driving while Latino in Arizona: discrimination.

But the difference between Arizona’s outright anti-Latino bias and the prejudice we’re seeing at the federal level is, as many things these days, disguised by concerns about the budget. It’s clear that Latinos are not fully represented in other national museums — a report in the 1990s found that Latinos were mostly ignored in these institutions. Yet, although the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian were funded largely by the federal government, the word on Capitol Hill is that a Latino museum would be okay — as long as it’s not federally funded.

¿Pero, qué? Am I missing something here? Could someone explain to me how this is not the same thing? The Times reports:

Federal money for the museum would not appear to be an option, members of Congress say, as it was for the African-American and Indian museums. The National Museum of African American History and Culture has a $500 million price tag, half of which is being paid by the federal government. The government paid for two-thirds of the Indian museum.

Commission leaders chose in recent days not to speak about their report before they brief Congress, in the first week of May. But it is anticipated that the panel will suggest that should a museum be authorized by the government, most of the financing could be raised privately.

Smithsonian officials have said they are open to the idea of including a Latino museum in their network, though some concede that it would be difficult to raise money for such an institution from the private sector while they are still committed to raising $250 million to finish the African-American museum.

There’s more information in the story, but pretty much what’s going on here at the highest “cultural” levels of our society is the same thing going on in the streets: if people can get something “useful” out of Latinos, they’ll take it, but when it comes to giving up something meaningful in return, the answer is “no.” I won’t expect this museum to be on my to-do list in D.C. anytime soon.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD

[Image Courtesy Facebook]