Wonderful reminders of a horrible year

If the Tina Modotti show needed more historical information, as I suggested in my previous post, no such addition is needed in Achac’s (Abraham Chacon) brilliantly inventive work because we have all lived through it. 2020 y Otras Catástrofes currently on view at MUACJ(Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juaréz) reminds us of that glorious year of 2020 when the pandemic and other horrors turned the world upside down.

Conceived as something like a graphic novel for the wall the work is divided into chapters illustrating with small, but pointed, cartoon like characters the various events and situations which occurred throughout the world ranging from the pandemic to US North Korean tensions to local issues such as water shortages. There are explanatory notes, though in most cases the drawings speak for themselves.

Los llamare Wintures ( winter creatures)

Cancion de Cuarentena

Nueva Normalidad

In addition there are various installations which speak specifically to being in and from Juaréz .

As an added bonus, there is an AR component for all of the pieces accessible with a downloadable app which gives added detail. That year might have been a catastrophe, but this work almost makes up for it. – David sokolec

Tina Modotti Sensibilidad y Critica at MUACJ

Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti’s most prolific period as a photographer was unquestionably the 20’s (both hers and the century’s) in Mexico and the current show at the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juaréz (MUACJ) provides a good overview of her work from that period showing her movement from the purely formalist concerns early in her work to her growimg political activism in the tumultuous political climate of that time and place. Born Assunta Luigia Adelaide Modotti, Tina Modotti was always interested in pursuing photography, but it was Edward Weston with whom she had a long affair who both encouraged her as a photographer and influenced her in focusing on shape and form. Later on as her political activism increased she focused much more on people and society. Both of these elements are present in the current show.

Looking at these photos today it is easy to forget that at the time they were considered very forward looking. In a review of her first and only major one person show in 1929, the reviewer Gustavo Ortiz Hernán described her works as part of the vanguard, “profoundly original” and distinct from any other. He calls attention to her capable use of plasticity and pays particular attention to a work of crystal cups. He also points to her politicalsensibilities showcasing two similar works involving corn, a guitar and a bandolier in one case, and a hoe replacing the guitar in the second as being a perfect synthesis of a social ideology and suggested they should be called “Revolution”.

All of these are present in the current show as well as two beautiful photos of calla lillies which makes one think of Georgia OḰeefe and wondering about influences. There are also wonderful photos focusing on hands. For Tina hands are the origin of everything because it is the basis for creation. Tina believed that photography should represent the real. She felt photography should not try to imitate other art forms but should simply reflect reality. This is fairly commonplace today, but was only just beginning to be recognized when she was working.

Where the show falls short is in a lack of context and information about both the photos and Modotti’s life. I know there are disagreements over how much, if any, information should appear on museum walls, but I do think it important for a museum to give relevant and important information where possible. Particularly in this case where in some instances the importance of the work is the subject of the photograph rather than the quality of the photo.

For instance, there is both a regular sized photo and then an enlarged version of the same photo showing Tina and “Robo” Richey in their studio, but nowhere does it mention that the Canadian born painter and poet Roubaix de l’Abrie Richey, known as “Robo”, was her first husband, or that it was in his San Francisco studio where she met and began her affair with the also married Edward Weston. Robo moved to Mexico where he wrote back glowing letters encouraging Tina to come.  She went only to find he had died two days before her arrival. Tina stayed, Weston joined her and that started a remarkably prolific period for both of them.

Tina and ¨Robo¨ Richey

Julio Antonio Mella

Another portrait for which there is little information is that of Julio Antonio Mella which makes no mention of the fact that the Cuban revolutionary was not only a great love of hers, but also was assassinated by unknown parties. At the time it was blamed on the Cuban dictator Machado, but Mella’s pro-Trotsky views among other things, provide ample reasons to believe it might also have been by pro-Stalinist forces. The show also includes a photo of Mella’s typewriter. It seems that the original photo had a few typed lines taken from Trotsky’s writings but when she sent it to be printed in Mexican Folkways the lines were scrupulously erased as they are here. None of this is mentioned.

Tina joined the Communist party in 1927 and this is reflected in her photography, though again there is insufficient information given here. There is a picture of campesinos reading “La Machete” but nothing mentioning this is the Communist party newspaper. There are the photographs of hands, but no mention of the importance that hands represented for her.

So the photographs are wonderful, they just need more than the vague and somewhat questionable information accompanying the show. I would suggest viewers might want to read more about this womanś troubled life. I am indebted to the well known author Pina Cacucci, for his wonderful biography of Tina Modotti which in Italian is simply called Tina, but which in my Spanish translation is called Los fuegos, las sombras, el silencio inspired by lines from a poem Pablo Neruda wrote specifically for Modotti and which is engraved on her tombstone.- David Sokolec

Q

Juarense Morales to the Whitney Museum

A huge congratulations to my friend Alejandro Luperca Morales for being accepted in this year’s Whitney Biennial.

The Whitney, the longest running exhibition of contemporary art in America and considered by many to be the most important, selected 63 artists for this year’s show entitled “Quiet as it’s kept.” Two other artists from Mexico were also selected: Mónica Arreola and Andrew Roberts, both from Tijuana are included in this year’s show.

Morales, originally from Ciudad Juárez and now living in Monterrey, México, has worked long and hard at promoting challenging art. For awhile he had a huge moving van here which he turned into a movable gallery and library taking it to various places around Juarez. He also worked with Frances Alys, when that internationally known artist was in town. This is a well-deserved honor and hopefully will provide much needed recognition for his endeavors.

For more information on the Biennial which runs from April 6 -Sept 5 go to their website https://Whitney.org. – dsokolec

It’s Desert Mountain Time

I’m sorry I haven’t written sooner about the remarkable project called Desierto Mountain Time which has been going on for several months already.

The brainchild of SUZANNE Sbarge, Director of 516 Arts in Albuquerque, this is a cross-border collaboration which attempts to create a dialogue among curators and artists of a region extending from Chihuahua to Denver and west to Tucson in which they ignore man-made political borders, though perhaps not geological ones. They are exploring all issues related to our region and the interpretations of this idea are as widely varied as the spaces between locations. The Rubin Center in El Paso had a massive cross-border installation literally reaching from El Paso into Juaréz. There are digital explorations of nature in the Southwest and panoramic photos at the Harwood Center in Taos New Mexico, and site specific installations in midtown Santa Fe.

There are also online conversations and a host of other things. Some of these have already happened but others are continuing and still others such as Bordaer (not a typo): Narratives and Cartographies of Migration are opening here in Juaréz on March 4 of the coming year.

The full catalogue can be found at DesiertoMountainTime.org. -David Sokolec

Days of Silence

I’m not sure if the name “365 Dias de Silencio” (365 days of Silence) at the recently opened exhibition at the Centro Cultural de last Frontera was meant to evoke Gábriel Garcia Marquez’s “100 years of Solitude”, but the past year has certainly felt a lot longer than usual. It has meant isolation for many of us and has forced us to perhaps reflect on our existence both in terms of how we relate to others and even to our own body.

This certainly seems to be the case with the three artists here who have all used the medium of clay to explore in different ways the sense of self.

Fausto Gómez Tuena uses the metaphor of the swimmer in his “El Nadador” series to focus on the self encapsulated in the physical external body, while Sofia Vázquez delineates the internal structure of that body in her work “Vives en Mi Columna.”

Abigail Hernandez Andrade addresses the issue of the self living separated from others in her enormous cement block structure “Inhabitable.”

None of these works specifically address the pandemic and quarantine per se. Andrade’s clever work could easily have been used as an exploration of life in any major city at any time in the past, but the past year has obviously made us more focused on ourselves, making this show even more relevant and a great little meditation on the subject. – David Sokolec

From top to bottom: El Nadador, Vives en Mi Columna, Inhabitable

In Memory of Russia Past

It is such a joy to have some of the museums here in Juarez open again after such a long time, and the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juarez has an extremely powerful show by Russian born Loulia Akhmadeeva called “Desde y Para la Memoria” (From and for Memory).

Akhmadeeva uses constructions, various printing techniques, sound and video to create a multi-dimensional show which evokes a Russian past. There are her personal memories such as a table filled with school books and photos, and her own perfume bottles each one filled with a photo of someone dear to her. There are tributes to her mother “whose borscht,” she writes with perhaps an understable bias, “was the best I ever tasted.” There is an aluminum pot with an explanation and the recipe for her mother’s borscht.

Reaching further back, she pays tribute to her grandmother Antonina Siderova, whose life was intertwined with sewing. There is a “Libro de Botones” with details of her grandmother’s life on each page.

This show is by no means some golden Proustian stroll down memory lane. Russian history has not been gentle and the most powerful pieces reflect that. The brutal siege of Stalingrad during World War 2 is here memorialized by photos and a simple aluminum pot holding 125 grams, which was the amount of bread rationed to children. The pot also memorializes Tanya Saulcheva, a 14-year old whose diary from the time recounts seeing her friends and family slowly dying from starvation around her.

A pot holding 125 grams

Unquestionably the most powerful section is the area devoted to the  massacre of children at Escuela #1 of Baslan, Osetia in 2004. September 1 is the first day of the school year in Russia and it is celebrated as a happy festival known as the “Dia de Conociemento” (Day of Knowledge).  On display is a heart wrenching blog written by 16 year old Agunda Bataeva who writes of the bright sunny day and how happy she was to be going to the first day of the school year and how happy she was to be with friends until the shooting started and many of her friends and fellow students were gunned down. Terrorists invaded the school and killed 183 students, ranging in age from 7-17. The center of the room is filled with a copy of  Akhmadeeva’s own school smock hanging with leaves falling from the ceiling in honor of the fall season when the tragedy occurred and perhaps the fallen children as well,  There are leaves lying in a huge pile on the floor surrounded by glasses of water placed there for the victims. We are asked to take a leaf in memory.

This section is dedicated not only to the murdered children at that school but to children everywhere who have been murdered in wars everywhere in times past and present. There is a sound recording of songs of peace sung by children and a video showing children turned into soldiers in conflicts throughout the world in these far too common events where adults seem to have turned into monsters and children into corpses.

Akhmadeva moved to Mexico  in 1994 where she became a citizen, and a professor. Her art has earned her many awards and she has been included in many international public and private collections.  This moving and heartfelt exhibit demonstrates why.- david sokolec

Life and Art in the Desert

Even though it might seem we’re living in a place containing only concrete, broken sidewalks and buildings, we’re actually living in a pretty vast desert, something readily apparent from a plane or even a fairly short drive. Of course, the word desert means different things to different people. Many who live elsewhere might think of the desert as being empty or barren. Those who have explored the desert know that careful scrutiny reveals abundant and varied forms of life. They also know it can be dangerous as well as rich and breathtakingly beautiful.

All of this by way of introduction to the exhibit “Desierto/ Arte/ Archivo” currently on view at the Central Cultural de la Frontera and running through the end of January.

This was a project begun back in June in which Dr Leon de la Rosa Carrillo engaged participants in exploring different aspects of desert life through a series of lectures and discussions led by different experts and figuring out ways of interpreting the culmination of those discussions through art.

Not unsurprisingly the show actually feels a bit like a desert. At first glance it seems spare, and perhaps even a bit arid. The predominant tone, mainly due to a few large pieces, is light brown. Like the desert itself the pieces require close inspection to reveal their beauty and riches.

Jane Terrazas’ work looks at first glance like a simple colored rendering of a part of the Chihuahuan desert, but it is, in fact, created with dyes made exclusively from plants found there with special attention paid to the controversial Samalayuca mine and the danger it poses to the region’s health. The qr code for the piece explains which plants produced which colors, and gives a more detailed explanation. While Terrazas uses plants, Cassandra Adame uses minerals and stones from the region to create pieces of jewelry set here among rocks from the area for her piece entitled Tierra de Nadie. (No Man’s Land, which also happens to be the Mexican title given to the movie Sicario.

The desert can mean a lot of different things. It can be a term indicating a place of danger and you might feel the need for protective armor, and while at first glance, Alejandra Rodríguez and Octavio Castrejón seem to have created what looks like some sort of Bedouin head covering, they have actually designed a physical protection which includes thick sharp wooden arm bands to protect against all manner of dangerous animals both four footed, but especially two footed, that roam in this desert city. Others mine their childhood or create desert curio cabinets to explore the theme.

The show contains video, installations, and among other pieces a series of very free flowing portraits drawn on long sheets of canvas. This work by artists Réne López Dorado and Alejandra Vargas called Sangre(s) de la Arena shows just the simplest rendering of individuals whose own recordings of reflections on their life can be downloaded from an accompanying qr code next to each

Perhaps the most impressive piece, and certainly the largest, is a recreation of the border wall with large recreations of all of the animals whose life is specifically threatened by its existence. This work called simply El Muro (the wall) by a team composed of Paola Mendoza, Laura Menesses, and JuanCarlos Reyes, provides something of an anchor to the show and is clearly linked to the impetus for the show itself, which was created in conjunction with Albuquerque 516 gallery as part of their Species in Peril of Extinction along the Rio Grande series.

At the risk of coming off as some kind of dinosaur, I do want to say something about the use of qr codes which are used exclusively here in lieu of wall information charts. They definitely provide a clean contemporary look and, more importantly, can transmit more and different kinds of information than can be provided on a simple wall post. On the other hand, while it might be safe to believe everyone has a phone capable of reading them, it seems a bit presumptuous to assume so. Additionally while the building, owned by the University, now offers free wifi to its guests, I’ve found it doesn’t always work, and not everyone has an unlimited data plan. This is not the fault of the show, but it is something that needs to be considered, otherwise it seems something of another unintentional barrier between those who have and those who don’t.

Apart from that quibble, this is an excellent show which reflects the hard work and careful thought expended in the long months of preparation and study, and focuses our attention on the fragile environment in which we live. – David Sokolec

Scenes of Absence in Juárez, Syria, Sudan

Brian Maguire is an artist with a gentle manner and a fierce spirit. He spends his time in various war zones and trouble spots talking to all sides involved, in the local prisons giving art lessons and to victim’s families listening to their stories. He then paints often enormous canvases based on his experiences. Maguire came to Juarez over a period of years during the narco wars, and included in his show Scenes of Absence on view at both the Rubin Center at UTEP in El Paso and at the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez (MACJ) are portraits of some of the many women murdered during that time. One family member told him that these women were at the very margins of society and nobody cared about them, but now, through his art, they are in the very center of the city.

All of this is to say that Maguire does some very good things. He doesn’t just dash in like a photojournalist on a deadline, but takes his time to explore wherever he is.

His paintings show an extremely good artist in command of his medium. His work is realistic in a late 20th century sort of way, looser than the more highly detailed paintings of the 18th century painters such as Gericault and Goya both of whom he names as influences. His paintings here are large, in the case of those in the Rubín Center, almost floor to ceiling, featuring mostly somber urban landscapes or individual bodies painted in dark colors often overlayed with dripped paint.

Aleppo

At heart though the work is political and any purely aesthetic discussion is somewhat beside the point.

The question, and it pains me to write this, is what exactly is the point. I find his work somewhat problematic. Perhaps his idea is to illustrate the depressing similarity of the effects of war. Whether they are fought in the name of religion, as in Northern Ireland, which he covered, or in the name of politics, as in Syria, or in the name of business, as in the drug wars here in Juarez, the result on the ground often presents a depressingly similar effect, but a little bit of that goes a long way. . The scenes he has painted in Syria could just as easily have been found in Juarez and vice versa. There is a lack of specificity to them. Even more than Géricault, Maguire is a huge fan of Goya. I suspect he is thinking especially of Goya’s Disasters of War works which also show the horrors of warfare painted during the Napoleonic wars. But those referenced a specific time period and place and formed only a part of Goya’s work. For someone who has spent so much time in individual locations talking to people, he seems to be going for only the most obvious and failing to record the complexities unique to each location.

I’ve lived in Juarez since the beginning of the worst of the drug war years, when journalists descended on the city and portrayed it as little more than a war zone. Some visitors came expecting to see bullets flying everywhere and were surprised to find people in the street going about their daily routine. Rather than simply showing a somber empty landscape or a mutilated body, a more complete picture of that time would also include the true heroes which were average citizens trying to go about their business. Students continued to go to schools and universities, when doing so was an act of heroism, because as one student said “You never knew when you left for school in the morning if you or your friends would all arrive back home safely that night” . Yet they continued with their studies. They packed concerts and theater productions. They jammed into book and poetry readings. In the worse year of the violence in terms of murders they waited for hours to skate at a new improvised outdoor skating rink. If there is something universal about the horrors of war, there is also something unique to each place, and it is almost essential to try to capture that as well particularly for someone who is not a photojournalist on deadline, but obviously someone who can take his time to explore a city or area. In addition to portraying the scenes of violence in any area it is equally important to show how people continued basic civilized behavior in the middle of utter chaos, not to throw in some sort of optimistic note, but because that forms a crucial part of the scenario. During the war in the former Yugoslavia, a man in Sarejevo was asked why he always wore a sport jacket in the middle of such violence . He said “If I don’t, the barbarians will have won.” Rather than only portraying the obvious effects of a war on a city an exploration of a war zone should also show how people try to keep the barbarians from winning.

The show at UTEP will be up through December 13 and at MACJ through November 24.-david sokolec

Procesos – working the line

As everyone knows, the Maquilas, those factories set up by international and national companies along the border helped transform the economy of Northern Mexican towns. As everyone also knows, they created problems inherent in the work itself and also as a result of a certain culture often found within the work environment.

The Art Museum of Ciudad Juárez(MUACJ) has mounted an exhibit called Procesos de Línea -which opened last Friday the 13th asking us to take a look at some of the consequences of long hours and repetitive work.

Of course there have been any number of other exhibits, demonstrations, and performances over the years on the subject, but it is always worth remembering and taking a look at the lives of people within our community working long hours for little pay to produce all manner of bright and shiny consumer goods. – David Sokolec

At Saturday’s Charla con Mujeres Trabajadores as a part of exhibition Procesos de Línea.

Children of the Rarimuri

There is a sweet photo exhibition which opened a few days ago at the Museo de Arqueologia here in Juarez that might be something of a needed antidote to the fear-fueled hate which arrived across the border recently.For some 12 years the ever active and seemingly tireless multi-tasking photographer Ogla (no, that’s not a typo) Liset Olivas has been photographing Rarimuri life in the Sierra Tarahumara and, through those photos, to bring us a closer understanding of what life is like in that rugged mountain range. In this show entitled La Raíz de Tu Mirada, she focused exclusively on Rarimuri children and women and their daily lives. By turns thoughtful or wistful or just grinning with delight the people in these photos reflect dignity and humanity.At a time when there are so many on the other side of the border who seem to feel frightened of anyone who seems different, this show helps remind us of our common humanity, and portrays a beautiful, strong and resilient group of people. It will be up until Sept 8.I also have to say that for anyone (like me) who has not been to the Museum in awhile and who remembers it as a small cramped area, it is it has been transformed into something totally different and wonderful with huge airy spaces and lots of room for exhibitions. – David sokolec