Tag: francisco toledo

Postcard from San Agustin Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico: Former factory rehabilitated as center for the arts

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As someone who grew up going to school in one of those flat-roofed, aqua-paneled elementary schools built in an aesthetically-impaired period of the 1950s, bumping into architectural gems in rural Mexico is always amazing to me. Isolated from its surrounding landscape and thrown into the midst of photographs from around the world, the photo above would be difficult to place. But not only was this handsome structure built in 1883 in rural Oaxaca, its functional purpose was not to serve as a palatial retreat. It housed a spinning and weaving factory – Hilados y Tejidos La Soledad Vista-Hermosa.

In 2000, the shuttered factory in San Agustin Etla was reclaimed by artist Francisco Toledo, who had founded Arte Papel Vista Hermosa nearby two years earlier. The artist purchased the property to serve as an ecologically based arts center. With public and private funding underwriting its adaptive reuse, the property opened to the public in 2006 as the Centro de las Artes de San Agustin, or CASA.

A retrospective exhibit of photographs of Mary Ellen Mark, who died this past year, is currently on exhibit in the lime green Galeria del Chalet perched above the former factory.

In 1991, film director Louis Malle described Mark’s work in Rolling Stone:

Because she is so intensely involved with her subjects, because she gets to know them intimately, because she loves them, she often reveals in one single shot their history, their emotions, their souls. When she photographed runaway boys and girls in the streets of Seattle, she spent so much time with them that her portraits project a disturbing intimacy, a powerful bond between the camera and the children. Strangely, some of the photographs seem like self-portraits…. she knows how to find the perfect angle, the exact fraction of a second that will tell the story in one shot.

Not only did Mark leave behind a legacy of remarkable photographs, but she left her imprint on the work of the hundreds of photographers she taught through the years. She led workshops in Oaxaca for more than 20 years, and we were fortunate to catch an exhibition of some of her students’ works at the Centro Fotografico Manuel Alvarez Bravo in Oaxaca as well.

Postcard from San Agustin Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico: Perfect jewels for that first anniversary

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Although paper is regarded as somewhat ephemeral, paper beads designed by Kiff Slemmons are meant to endure.

Slemmons’ works are represented in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. According to Amy Yee in The New York Times, her unusual one-of-a-kind creations normally sell for $5,000 to $10,000, but most of her chunky contemporary jewelry designs for Arte Papel Vista Hermosa in San Agustin Etla sell for well under $50 (Note: The price tag visible on one of the pictured bracelets is in pesos, 250 pesos, or about $14.).

The paper workshop was founded by artist Francisco Toledo in 1998 in a former hydroelectric plant that once served Oaxaca City. Using the available water supply, native plants surrounding the workshop and traditional natural dyes, a dozen artisans tapped by Toledo make their living at the workshop.

Yee wrote that Toledo invited Slemmons to el taller in 2000. Her resulting jewelry designs involve folding and rolling strips of the workshop’s handmade paper. Slemmons now makes time annually to travel from Chicago to work with the craftsmen in Oaxaca, refining the pieces and refreshing herself by experiencing “what can happen through collaboration.”

Sheets of textured paper, kites and jewelry perfect for that first anniversary celebration are available at the workshop and in museum shops in Oaxaca City.

 

Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Tattooed Museum Walls

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Museums in Oaxaca don’t shy away from exhibiting edgy work, and a show linking Dr. Lakra and Toño Camuñas at Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños proves no exception.

The tattoos on the bodies of both artists seem to spill onto their works on the walls. The comic-book-like drawings of Camuñas easily could be labeled pornographic. Dr. Lakra, née Jerónimo López Ramírez, began his career as a tattoo artist. His upward trajectory has included solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston and The Drawing Center in New York City, where statue-topped pedestals dominating the exhibit in Oaxaca emerged.

Covering Lakra’s 2011 show for The New York Times, Carol Kino wrote:

“Lakra is a much more complex artist than people realize,” said his longtime art dealer and friend Jose Kuri, a partner in the Mexico City gallery Kurimanzutto. “It’s very easy to pigeonhole him as a tattoo artist who entered the art world with these tattoos on vintage magazines. But he’s really well-educated in classical painting and anthropology.”

… Born in Mexico City as Jerónimo López Ramírez, Dr. Lakra is the eldest son of the anthropologist and poet Elisa Ramírez Castañeda and the painter Francisco Toledo, one of Mexico’s towering cultural figures. (Mr. Toledo has had a hand in founding just about every cultural institution in his native Oaxaca.)

Dr. Lakra and his older sister, the conceptual artist Laureana Toledo, spent their childhood travelling around the world and continued visiting their father wherever he was living — New York, Paris, Barcelona — after their parents divorced in 1980. “My father took us to many, many museums,” Dr. Lakra said.