Gayle Brennan Spencer – sending random thoughts to and from South Austin
Above: Detail of a side altar of Templo Santo Domingo de Guzman
Spare words are being offered. We have visited Santo Domingo so many times through the years, yet we are still always gob-smacked by her beauty.
Many others are as well, making the dawn-of-the-17th-century Baroque church a magnet for destination weddings. A four-year age-defying face-lift undertaken in the 1990s successfully masks her age.
Continue reading “Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Santo Domingo wears her age well”
This woman’s anxious expression on a wall in Oaxaca is a bit frightening to have surfaced close to my birthday. I’ve decided to consider her as successfully defiant.
Some years are harder than others. The image below of the late Vicente Fernandez did not weather well this past year.
But walls in Oaxaca are everchanging canvases for artists, new discoveries encountered with every walk. As prints peel and fade, other layers soon are plastered over them – palimpsests of life.
Continue reading “Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Always welcome more candles on your cake”
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.
Continue reading “Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Threading together women’s stories”
Postcards from Barton Springs 