Tag: mupo

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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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.