Postcard from Oaxaca: Spots to savor and maybe crunch a few bugs

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Above: El Amu created a fresh-from-the-farm atmosphere in town.

Spotlighting restaurants in alphabetical order sometimes launches into non-native cuisines; Boulenc is an example of this.

The French-style bakery never fails to impress, and it’s a go-to spot to snag a jar of just-peanuts crunchy mantequilla de cacahuete. Salads are sharable, and the fired-up pizza oven turns out pies we crave after a week of more traditional dishes. Plus, a nice affogato – gelato drowned in espresso – for dessert. The restaurant also has a cafe in the Jalatlaco neighborhood, Becino, that we did not visit.

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Contemporary Native American artists, plus a century of Surrealism

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Above: Detail of Martine Gutierrez’ “Queer Rage, Imagine Life-Size, and I’m Tyra, p66-67,” from Indigenous Woman, 2018.

Work by nine contemporary indigenous artists was assembled for “Native America: In Translation,” curated by artist Wendy Red Star and displayed at the Blanton Museum of Art.

No one was going to put me on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine, so I thought, I’m gonna make my own.”

Martine Gutierrez referring to her 2018 art magazine, Indigenous Women, Curator notes

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Postcard from Marseille, France: Taming ‘les tags sauvages’

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Securing affordable housing leads artists to seek out urban neighborhoods sometimes reputed to be gritty. As noted in an earlier post featuring street art in Marseille, the creative vitality they bring is transformative. Quirky shops pop up. Inventive chefs open outlier cafes and restaurants with tables spilling out onto the sidewalks.

Walls once covered with threatening-looking, unauthorized tagging get reupholstered with a layer of more artistic grafitti. As a result, two of the most fun neighborhoods to explore in Marseille are Le Panier and Cours Julien, both uphill from the harbor.

Surrendering to urban artists, Marseille embraced them in 2018. The government launched an ambitious partnership with a group of artists, Massilia Graffiti, organizers of a successful street art festival in the Cours Julien area. Forty-thousand euros of public funds were invested in an innovative program to combat les tags sauvages, or wild tagging.

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