Category: Mexico

Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Threading together women’s stories

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Above: Installation by Elena Martinez Bolio included in “Una Larga Hebra/A Long Stitch” at Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca

As an artist, I am a conduit so that the moment of creation, which is so vast and profound, can emerge from the simplicity and humility of a needle. That is what I try to express in this exhibition, to marvel again and to find meanings in the garments we wear day by day, because they record memories of what is ours.” 

Elena Martinez Bolio, “A Long Thread“

Artist Elena Martinez Bolio has spent years working alongside women in villages of the Yucatan. She has learned their techniques for what has often been dismissed as mere domestic craft and liberated those applications to relate her personal stories and theirs. We were fortunate to catch an exhibition of her work, “A Long Stitch,” at the Museum of Cultures of Oaxaca this past spring.

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Time to weigh your blog consumption

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Above: A peacock on the grounds of Real Alcazar in Seville, Spain

Are you sure you’re feeling okay? On examining the list of the most-read posts during the past twelve months, it hit me what is missing. Food. I think this might be the first time since launching these biannual roundups that not one post about restaurants appears on the list. Perhaps while I’m out plumping up during travels, all my readers are on Ozempic.

It always surprises me how different my list of favorites would be than yours. Your interests remain all over the map, which is good because postcard delivery lags way behind our travels. I have a full album of photos waiting to pop up willy-nilly from Mexico, Italy, Spain, England, France, Turkey and the Netherlands.

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Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Richness of contemporary art scene evident at MUPO

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Above: Detail of “Aborregados 6” by Soledad Velasco

The works with acrylic and India ink are a mixture that balances the safe and the unsure, the spontaneity and the calculated. While acrylic is more stable and gives solidity to the work, the pen and water give that feeling of chance, of an accident that must be controlled…. The immediacy and freshness, the lack of control when one decides to drain the water and the necessary control that ends up being exercised, all of this is a metaphor for what each day has in store for us. And in my case, a reminder that nothing is entirely predictable or certain.”

Soledad Velasco

Originally hailing from Oaxaca, artist Soledad Velasco spent 25 years working in Spain before returning home in 2019. Earlier this year, we saw the fruit of her time spent since then in a one-person show, “A Eva,” at Museo de los Pintores Oaxaquenos, or MUPO.

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