Gallery 4
May 20 to August 19, 2011
Vincent Price Art Museum is delighted to present a solo show by Los Angeles-based artist Sonia Romero to inaugurate its new project gallery called the HOY SPACE. In Spanish, Hoy means “today” or “nowadays,” and fittingly the HOY SPACE features contemporary artists whose practice extends across media and who address current and active contemporary topics. The HOY SPACE offers emerging artists their first museum show, and for mid-career artists, a chance to make new work that may not fit in other contexts or venues.
Ms. Romero’s installation Inner Landscape is a mixture of painting, block printing, felt sculptures, and paper cuts that are intelligently unified both formally and conceptually. Romero began as a painter, and then in college at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), she majored in printmaking thereby exploring every printing process she could: etching, lithography, silkscreen and block printing. Rather than treat each medium as a distinct and separate creation, or as an end in itself, her work reflects a bold mixing of painting with print; a juxtaposition that has become decidedly her own.
Romero’s imagery is certainly recognizable: whimsical, quirky – and even at times – playful, the artist’s approach reduces elements down to their essentials without a sense of preciousness. The innocence of her drawing belies the complexity of her subject matter. Romero is a keen investigator: her work asks questions and explores social issues. However, there is no polemical stance or finger pointing.
The three large piles we see upon entering Inner Landscape are seemingly benign, arranged like haystacks; from left to right, we recognize bison skulls, kernels of corn, and bright, white eggs, piled up to about 9 feet each. Each of these piles is directly inspired by the artist’s keen interest in the historical and contemporary relationship of people with food. The bison skulls reference American perceptions toward nature and wildlife during the founding of this country; the corn kernels pay homage to a commodity that in its superabundance has become one of the most ubiquitous; and the egg pile to an almost half billion salmonella-related egg recall that occurred in 2010.
A long-time fascination with the politics of consumption has led Romero to create what she calls “gorgeous manifestations of abundance.” Void of darkness, gloominess or judgment, in each element of her installation, Romero invites us to consider imagining our own inner landscape, and seeks to engage us with our own personal stories that may resonate with the ones she has shared with us.
Sonia Romero is a Los Angeles native, and maintains a studio in Highland Park. She received her BFA from RISD in 2002. This is her first solo museum exhibition. She has had solo shows at The Folk Tree, Los Angeles, CA and Avenue 50 Studio, Los Angeles, CA, in addition to many group exhibitions across the United States. She is also well known for her public-art-commissioned projects for the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). Please visit the artist’s website:www.SoniaRomero.net for more information.
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Photo by Jeff Cote of the SMC Corsair
On Thursday, May 5, an event at Santa Monica College called "Movimiento" served as a focal point for others to see how art is incorporated into messages of activism.
The info session took place at the Pete and Susan Barrett Gallery of the Performing Arts Center, where Los Angeles based artists, activists, and organizers came together to discuss stories of successes and setbacks achieved in the convergence of activism and art.
A few of them have been inspired by student activism, confronting issues such as the Dream Act, concerning undocumented students struggling to find a place.
Bianca Hernandez, one of the first speakers, is President of SMC's Association of Latin American Students. Hernandez presented snapshots of ALAS's actions conducted on campus throughout the past couple years. She stressed the importance of political awareness, and how as a group, they try to fight what's right for them.
ALAS have also taken action in events such as the "March to End the Stereotypes," and more recently, they took part in the "March in March," a student protest fighting against tuition increases by going to Sacramento in March. Hernandez noted how they have incorporated the art of dance into their activities on campus.
Todos Somos Arizona is a collective of different community members, educators, activists, and artists who use different mediums of art and activism mixed together. Patricia Torres, a UCLA student in the Ph.D. department, and organizer with a couple of collectives in Los Angeles, said that they discuss the colonization of their communities and other concerns that they're seeing right now, such as SB 1070 and the attacks on ethnic studies.
According to Torres, INCITE! LA is an organization of radical feminists of color,committed to stopping interpersonal violence, domestic abuse, and police brutality within their communities. INCITE! LA also opposes SB 1070, Arizona's bill that allows criminalization or imprisonment of immigrants.
INCITE! held a major act of demonstration last May, in which 14 members chained themselves into a circle in front of the Downtown Los Angeles detention center, which caused it to close down for about six hours. "We saw it almost as a work of public art where we were actually stopping the everyday runnings of this detention torture place," Torres explained.
Artist Rodrigo Marti was one of the organizers of the info session. His art project that was installed in the room was called "Non-Resident Alien." He said the project will hopefully be the start of what will turn into different ways of working with the student groups he has been meeting and learning from.
Another artist named Felicia Montes had her artwork on display as part of the "Otis College of Art and Design 2011 Graduate Public Practice Degree Exhibition."
"Art is a tool for education, empowerment, and transformation," Montes said.
The special guest for the evening's event was Carlos Montes, an activist during the Chicano Movement of the 1960s. Montes spoke of his memories of the past, and said, "What art is about is creating controversy. It's for making movement in your community."
Article courtesy of the Corsair of SMC.
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San Antonio's Witte Museum marked the centennial of the Mexican Revolution last year with its multifaceted exhibition “1910: A Revolution Across Borders.” Now the venerable institution examines the artistic legacy of that earth-shattering rip in society's fabric with a seismic summer show that traces the development of Mexican art over the past 80 years in some 100 works.
“Miradas: Mexican Art From the Bank of America Collection” features paintings, prints and photography by 32 artists, including Diego Rivera, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide and Rufino Tamayo, as well as contemporary artists such as Alejandro Colunga, Judithe Hernandez and Luis Jiménez.
“The ‘Revolution' show was very gritty,” says Marise McDermott, Witte president. “It really captured the violence of those times. This one explores the explosion of art across the U.S.-Mexico border.”
According to Cesáreo Moreno, chief curator and visual director at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, a furor of post-Revolution nationalism fueled the engines of creativity as Mexican artists rediscovered their country's past and peered ahead into its future.
“At the close of the war, an era of peace was ushered in gradually, with a different political order, a strong sense of nationalism — known as Mexicanidad (Mexican-ness) — and newfound social goals,” says Moreno, organizer of “Miradas,” a touring show culled from one of the country's strongest corporate collections. “Artists sought to develop an artistic language that could convey their sense of modernity in an increasingly industrialized world.”
Among the outlets of expression was a cultural movement known as Indigenismo (Indigenism or Indianism), Moreno says, pointing to “Miradas” paintings by Jean Charlot, a Zapotec mestizo born in Paris in 1898, and Guatemala native Carlos Mérida's series of lithographs reimagining the creation myths of the Popol Vuh.
“Artists and writers who participated in this movement explored their national heritage and proudly included in their work aspects of ancient Mesoamerican culture,” he says.
The Mexican mural movement emerged from the Revolution as well, and Los Tres Grandes (The Three Giants) — Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros — became Mexico's artistic ambassadors, global beacons who championed indigenous culture and the rights of the common man, even as they adopted and adapted international avant garde theories and methods.
Although a meditative suite of later (1968) Siqueiros lithographs dealing with family (“Mother and Child”) and community (“Village Dance”) is included here, visitors will find only one work by Rivera, who, as Witte curator of collections Amy Fulkerson points out, has a long history with the museum.
“The Witte was the first venue in San Antonio to exhibit Rivera, in 1927, so it's a nice connection to our history,” Fulkerson says.
Rivera's 1932 lithograph “The Teacher — The Fruits of School,” which looks like a pencil drawing at first glance, is a sensual work that “employs the classicizing style of Italian Renaissance fresco alongside the smooth elongated forms favored by the Cubists,” Moreno writes in exhibition materials. “His symbolic image valorizes popular education and implies it is planting the seeds of the nation's future.”
Photography occupies a longstanding and important niche in the history of Mexican art, and no exhibition chronicling the 20th century would be complete without Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the influential photographer whose work is such an important window on the world, as well as being a bridge from the past to the present.
The images here, which span the years from 1927 to 1972, capture a sense of Mexican daily life that only Alvarez Bravo could, with his unique vision. His '30s portrait of Frida Kahlo is absolutely majestic.
The most striking photographs in “Miradas,” however, are by Graciela Iturbide, born in 1942, who apprenticed with Alvarez Bravo — and perhaps has surpassed the master. Iturbide's lens found one of Mexico's most iconic images, which she titled “Mujer angel (Angel Woman),” depicting a young woman navigating the Sonora Desert, presumably heading north, with a boom box in her hand. It compresses so much political information into a single image.
The Chicano movement is epitomized in the work of Judithe Hernandez. The pioneering artist is represented here by a strong 2008 pastel on paper work from her Manos de sangre series.
“Red Hand, Bloody Hand, Hand of Oppression” encompasses nine small facial portraits of women in a grid format, as if they are caged or jailed. Bloody handprints are splashed on eyes, mouths, cheeks or necks, reflecting the artist's concern about the abuse of women. It's difficult not to think of the hundreds mysteriously murdered along the border when contemplating Hernandez's disturbing piece.
Many other works are worth discussing in “Miradas”: “There truly is something for everyone in ‘Miradas,'” Fulkerson says.
Can't miss works include a suite of prints by Luis Jiménez (check out “Bronco I”; nobody captured equine fury like Jiménez); the surreal folk narrative paintings of Alejandro Colunga, leader of the Nueva Mexicanidad movement; the “Rodeo Drive” series of Cibachrome prints dealing with rampant consumerism and the inequity of wealth by Los Angeles artist Anthony Hernandez; the symbolic paintings of self-taught artist Raymundo Andrade, who holds degrees in medicine and history, a fact that obviously influences his allegorical work; and Ricardo Rendon's large multimedia installation “Trabajo Diario (Daily Work),” which takes up two walls and features 31 consecutive front pages of the tabloid periodical La Jornada from August 2007.
“Miradas” visitors can't fail to linger over Javier Chavira's “El guerrero (Warrior),” which dominates the entry foyer to the exhibition, and in many ways embodies the dominant themes of the show: Chavira is a young Mexican American artist educated in the Midwest who draws on traditional Mexican sources of imagery, including indigenous sculpture, the Catholic Church and native folk art.
“In addition to producing drawings and paintings,” Moreno says, “Chavira has executed murals on schools and other buildings. ‘The Warrior,' with its architectonically rendered, monumentally proportioned head of an indigenous male, is reminiscent of Chavira's murals.”
In Spanish, the word mirada usually refers to a quick glimpse, but in the case of “Miradas,” it also can evoke a longer look, a deep, captivating gaze.
“Miradas” runs through Aug. 21 at the Witte Museum, 3801 Broadway in San Antonio, Tejas.
My wife Ann Marie Leimer had a book signing and lecture in San Antonio this past weekend. We had an opportunity to see friends and also go...
