Conaculta Inba

Foro México 68

Carlos Guevara Meza
 
 
This text was read at the openning sesión of the forum México 68. A Cincuenta Años, at Aula Magna José Vasconcelos, Centro Nacional de las Artes, on October 4, 2018. Continuar Leyendo →

TO PUBLIC OPINION

 
 
The Academic Council of the Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información de Artes Plásticas (Cenidiap), of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), hereby expresses its concern regarding the works being carried out at the building once occupied by the former Secretaría de Comunicaciones, Transportes y Obras Públicas, (SCOP), in Eje Central and Xola, in Mexico City. We request that INBA make a public pronouncement in defense of the preservation and restoration of the murals and sculptures located in the building, through its corresponding department, in conformity with the laws regarding the protection of Mexico’s artistic heritage.
Continuar Leyendo →

La Esmeralda in the Student Movement of 68

Leticia Galaviz and José Serrato
 
 
Those of us who enrolled in 1965 in Escuela Nacional de Pintura y Escultura (ENPE) “La Esmeralda” were a young, restless group. Many came from provincial cities in Mexico, some came from abroad. We all had great expectations for our education at this national school. Continuar Leyendo →

The Interplay of Past and Present. Hélio Oiticica at Museo Jumex

Andrés Reséndiz Rodea
 
 
Is it posible for a work of art, dating back 50 years, to offer a contemporary sensory experience with elements of the future? In 1967, perhaps without this being his main goal, Hélio Oiticica (Río de Janerio, 1937-1980) produced a work exploring the possibility of including variable and random stimuli from eras as removed from his as our own. This was made possible by a particular element he introduced in his creative work. We will reflect uopn this in this article. Continuar Leyendo →

An Instant On the Road. Alejandro Gómez de Tuddo’s Exhibition at Cenart

Rubí Aguilar Cancino
 
 

Death is a lived life. Life is a coming death.

Jorge Luis Borges

 
 
The main theme of the second International Photography Festival FotoMéxico was Latitudes, an invitation to explore the geographical, anthropological and disciplinary diversity in contemporary photography. Works were exhibited along four axis: Politics and Society; Landscape and Territory; Traces and Memory; and Body and Identity. Continuar Leyendo →

Ways of Seeing: Yolanda Ceballos’ Transitions

Alejandra Estrada
 
 
The collective exhibition Modos de ver ran between January 26 and April 29, 2018, at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, in Mexico City. It was curated by Tatiana Cuevas and presented in coordination with Programa Bancomer (fifth edition), with an aim to promote nine young artists selected by a jury and backed by renowned advisors, like Carlos Amorales, from an interdisciplinary research project centered on analizing and debating new ways of producing and seeing contemporary art in al lof its diversity. I thank the museum for the information it provided. Continuar Leyendo →

Episodio by Estrella Carmona and 7102 Fantasma Semiótico SCituacionista

María Eugenia Garmendia Carbajal and Edwina Moreno Guerra
 
 
Estrella Carmona is one of the artists under consideration within our research project at Cenidiap: ‘Representaciones Apocalípticas, Catastróficas y Silentes en el Arte Pictórico Contemporáneo Mexicano’. We visited two exhibitions of her work: a solo show at Museo de Arte de la Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público, and a collective exhibition at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil. Continuar Leyendo →

Carlos Amorales at MUAC: Axioms for Action (1996-2018)

Edwina Moreno Guerra
 
 
It is remarkable for a young Mexican artist like Carlos Amorales (Mexico City, 1970) to exhibit at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC).
Havig lived and trained in Europe (1990-2004), he returned to Mexico as an established artist. This exhibition showcases pieces from different and even disparate genres. The effort invested in developing each piece is apparent; spectators have to concentrate in order to fully appreciaate them. There are no distinctive marks to give the show a degree of coherence, but if we were told that this is actually a collective exhibition we would promptly believe it, because he engages with so many artistic disciplines: drawing, painting, sculpture, collage, performance, installation, sound art, cinema, writing, and other non traditional forms. Continuar Leyendo →

An approach to Neuroesthetics: Artistic Creation and Expression

Blanca Estela Lamadrid Palomares
 
 
Why is it said that art creation and appreciation are produced in the brain? In the last decade, more information has been gathered about the brain than in all the preceding history of scientific research on its functioning. Interest in the research of art and the neuronal connections required for artistic creation expands today over several cultural and scientific fields. Biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, architects, mathematicians, physicists, and neurologists take on aesthetic problems. Continuar Leyendo →

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Mexican (IN)documentado

Edwina Moreno
 
 
One might say that now is “the moment” for Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s art. Looking into his life and work, one discovers that political decisions by President Trump against Mexican immigrants provide a timely space for Gómez-Peña’s artistic actions. This Mexican artist migrated to the USA when he was young; his thoughts regarding Chicanos do not stem from a political, social, or human rights perspective, not even from a conventional artistic point of view, but rather from the standpoint of a contemporary artist whose expression is both empathic and experiential, since he has felt the brunt of discrimination suffered by so many of our fellow Mexicans. Continuar Leyendo →

The Oscillation of Time

María Eugenia Garmendia Carbajal
 
 
It was just after sunrise… the clock read 7:19 when an earthquake shook Mexico City on September 19, 1985. It took just two minutes for it to destroy several buildings, taking the lives of thousands of people residing or working in the Cuauhtémoc, Venustiano Carranza, Benito Juárez, Gustavo A. Madero, Miguel Hidalgo and Coyoacán areas of the city. . It was an 8.1 magnitude earthquake, the epicenter was located in the Pacific Ocean shore, in the border between the states of Michoacán and Guerrero. The 7.6 aftershock the following evening brought down several buildings that had been structurally damaged.
Continuar Leyendo →

Apocalyptic, catastrophic and silent representations in contemporary Mexican painting

Adriana Zapett, Edwina Moreno y María Eugenia Garmendia
 
 
Introduction
 
 
One of the modalities of contemporary Mexican painting seems troubling to us, as it displays the self-destructive potential of human beings both individually and collectively, bearing witness to angst and hopelessness. In images of strange beauty, dealing with cruelty and the tearing apart, the injury or mutilation of the body, or perhaps the crumbling down of an imaginary space represented on canvas, the painter transforms the death drive into figurability. (1) Continuar Leyendo →

Rosario Cabrera and the passion for teaching

Eduardo Espinosa Campos
 
 
The first work by Rosario Cabrera (1901-1975) I remember seeing is the oil portrait of a little girl, reproduced in the catalogue of the exhibition organized as a tribute to the Open Air Painting Schools (EPAL), at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1981. The girl is seated, holding a piece of paper in her hand. The painting displays careful drawing and a balanced composition; the fragile body occupies the right side of the canvas, towards the lower left corner, leaving ample space on the opposing side to accentuate the private world and the candor of the subject. She has delicate features, her elongated and melancholy eyes look straight at the spectator. This painting remained etched in my memory, along with the artist’s name and her involvement with EPAL. I knew that Rosario Cabrera had been a teacher in those schools and nothing more. Continuar Leyendo →

Pola Weiss, Mexican precursor of video art

Adriana Zapett Tapia
 
 
She created an unmistakable autobiographic and intrspective style, but in constrast to this ceaseless exploration of her own inner life, in her video production she was also interested in issues relating to feminism, society, politics and ecology. Continuar Leyendo →

Perla Nanette Krauze Kleinbort

Graciela Schmilchuk
 
 
Perla Krauze (Mexico City, 1953) creates processes out of extended periods of documentation and research of specific materials and sites. She is a tireless traveller and a consumate walker: she locates places rich in those things that attract her, natural or artificial, in rural or urban landscapes; these can e stones, ceramics, traces, imprints, large or tint fragments, but always focused on the precarious. Continuar Leyendo →

Martha Pacheco, painting of death and madness

Edwina Moreno Guerra
 
 
Born in the Santa Tere quarter in Guadalajara, Jalisco, on Decemer 10, 1957. Her interest in drawing begn in her childhood. She began her studies in the Sunday Drawing Workshop at Guadalajara’s Galería Municipal. Searching for her own method, she took up photography to document her paintings. She was 14 when she started cutting images from magazines to draw animals, human figures and landscapes. At 19, having finished her training as a teacher in the Escuela Normal de Occidente, she enrolled in the Escuela de Artes Plásticas of the Universidad de Guadalajara (1976-1981). Continuar Leyendo →

Mariana Yampolsky

Patricia Priego
 
 
On September 6, 1925, in Chicago, Illinois, Hedwing and Oscar Yampolsky celebrated the birth of their daughter, whom they named Mariana. Oscar was a sculptor, painter and cabinetmaker.Being an onky child, living in the countryside, Mariana’s childhood was solitary; her favourite pastimes were reading and listening to her grandafather’s stories. She enrolled in the University of Chicago to study Socoial Science, but in 1945, after the death of her father, she decided to travel to Mexico and study painting and sculpture at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura Escultura y Grabado La Esmeralda, in Mexico City. She was the first woman printmaker and member of the Taller de Gráfica Popular, an organization that distinguished itself for its fight against fascism and its social protest prints. From the start, Mariana Yampolsky travelled around the country, falling in love with its landscapes, its people and its culture. In 1958 she became a Mexican citizen. She went on to become an expert in Mexican popular traditions, especially those associated with textile crafts. Continuar Leyendo →

Lilia Carrillo: abstract spirituality

Irma Fuentes Mata
 
 
Lilia Carrillo’s paintings can be placed within the lyrical abstractiontrend proposed and explained by Kandisnsky in his book On the spiritual in art (1911), a work which established a line
followed by many painters who offer up artistic forms consistent with their historical situation from a persoal perspective. Kandinsky recognizes the importance of striving to reflect only the essence and the mystical motivations emerging from the artist’s inner needs, something that characterizes Lilia Carrillo’s paintings. Continuar Leyendo →

Between popular music and painting: Isabel Villaseñor

Leticia Torres
 
 

A mutifaceted artist, Isabel Villaseñor was an engraver, painter, writer, popular music compiler and interpreter, composer of corridos, screenwriter, actress and muralist. She was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, on May 18, 1909, the daughter of Adela Ruiz Valencia and Ramón Villaseñor Quevedo. In 1917, the family moved to Mexico City along with the maternal grandmother, Eduarda Valencia, who taught her granddaughter the love for Mexican popular music. In 1922 she took part in the literacy campaign organized by the Public Education Secretary José Vasconcelos. Influenced by her paternal grandmother, Isabel Quevedo, she began writing short stories and poems, something she would do for the rest of her life. With the poem Primavera she won in 1927 the La Flor contest, organized by the periodical El Universal Ilustrado; the following year, her short story Nuestra Señora de los Zacatecas won first prize at a contest organized by the government of Zacatecas. Continuar Leyendo →

Inaugural Session of the VII Conference on Research and Documentation in the Visual Arts

Carlos Guevara Meza
 
 
Read at Aula Magna, Cenart, Mexico City, October 18, 2017
 
 
Good morning.
 
 
On behalf of the National Center for Research, Documentation and Information on the Visual Arts (Cenidiap) it is an honor to welcome you to this

VII Conference on Research and Documentation in the Visual Arts

. I appreciate the presence of the authorities of the National Arts Center (Cenart) and the General Subdirection of Arts Education and Research (SGEIA) of the National Institute of Fie Arts (INBA) who are joining us here today, as well as the participation of both the speakers and the audience, here at this conference room and through the internet. Continuar Leyendo →

Beatriz Ezban

Laura González Matute
 
 

Beatriz Ezban was born in Mexico City in 1955. She is part of the Judeo-Mexican community. She currently lives and works in Mexico City. From her beginnings as a painter she has been highly regarded in the visual arts world.
Continuar Leyendo →

Conference on the Aesthetics of Science Fiction

Carlos Guevara Meza
 
 
Read at Aula Magna, Cenart, Mexico City, on November 23, 2017.
 
 

Good morning.
 
 
On behalf of the National Center for Research, Documentation and Information on the Visual Arts, I warmly welcome you to this Conference on the Aesthetics of Science Fiction, whose purpose it is to think in earnest the depths of something which, regrettably in my opinion, is regarded by many (and even if it were by just one it would still be too much) as mere entertainment, both ordinary and superficial, except for a handful of established masterworks. Continuar Leyendo →

El Corcito. A critical and multidisciplinary artist

Guillermina Guadarrama Peña
 
 

Art, for those who make it, is not a pleasure, it is a hard toil
involving sacrifices and great discipline. The enjoyment of art is for
the peope or the audience, who even though cannot make it, loves it, understands it and desires it. The phenomenon has been produced, and those who are bitten by this spider can never get out of its webs.
Antonio Ruiz

Continuar Leyendo →

The garden as a house

Carmen Gómez del Campo
 
 
Thank you all for being here with us in the presentation of the catalogue El jardín como casa, the ceramics creation trajectory of Mariana Velázquez. I thank INBA, Cenart and Cenidiap for providing us with this space to show you how a house surrounded by a garden becomes a warm, welcoming place, inhabited by nature, intertwined with ceramic pieces created by Mariana. Thanks to her, as well, for allowing us to enter her fantastic garden. Continuar Leyendo →

RESISTING FOR LIFE

Alberto Híjar Serrano
 
 
If Felipe Ehrenberg (1943-2017) were still here, we would have discussed the gatherong resistance against the State’s so-called “historical truth” about Ayotzinapa, through slogans, texts, and graphic art, constantly moving not only in Mexico and the United States, but in Europe and other far-off places. The rural and popular roots of the Ayotzinapa relatives meet libertarian intelectual lucidity, bringing about a high-impact knowledge all over the world, against the systemic corruption of late capitalism. Continuar Leyendo →

AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE

Alberto Híjar Serrano
 
 
Arturo García Bustos died of a heart attack while an exhibition of his and Rina Lazo’s work -organized by Dina Comisarenco- was still open to the public at the library of Universidad Iberoamericana. The beloved maestro passed away at the Red House in Coyoacán; some people call it the House of Malinche, but I prefer the former name, with its association with the color that identifies all communists. Continuar Leyendo →

Rediscovering Mural Paintings: Works for Children by Carlos Mérida and Emilio Amero

Guillermina Guadarrama Peña
 
 
In August, 2016, restorers from Centro Nacional de Conservación y Registro del Patrimonio Artístico Mueble, INBA (CNCRPAM) , began preservation work on the mural paintings located at what is today the Belisario Domínguez grammar school, in Colonia Guerrero, Mexico City. The hallway, the corridors on both floors and some classrooms are covered with paintings made by students from Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado La Esmeralda in the 1950’s. Back then, the school was in the opposite building and it was a suitable place for carrying out student practices. Antonio M. Ruiz, Pablo O’Higgins and Arnold Belkin were mural painting teachers at different times in that period. Continuar Leyendo →

Siqueiros’ Three Names

Guillermina Guadarrama Peña
 
 
David Alfaro Siqueiros’ actual name was José de Jesús David.[1] This wasn’t unusual in the 19th century; children were given more than two names, even up to six or seven. He was baptized in the church of San José, on January 11, 1897, near the home adress on his certificate of baptism: 30 Arcos de Belén, where there is a furniture shop today. Back then, people would only baptize their children, omitting to inscribe their birth on the Public Registry office, but according to Raquel Tibol in an article published in Proceso magazine, there is indeed a birth certificate but it was issued in Irapuato, Guanajuato, where he was allegedly registered when he was already three years old, by his grandparents, but she didn’t produce any photographs. It may be true, because after his mother died giving birth to his brother Jesús Mario Luis Francisco, his father took them along with their sister María de la Luz to their paternal grandparents’ house in Irapuato. But apparently Siqueiros’ third name wasn’t written down on his birth certificate. Continuar Leyendo →

The Community Art of Taller de Investigación Plástica

Guillermina Guadarrama Peña
 
 
The Taller de Investigación Plástica (TIP) was a multidisciplinary artistic collective born in the upheavals of the 1970’s, a time of major social movements. It was the first group to produce community art in Mexico, a kind of public art that emerged when “individualism and art for art’s sake began to be replaced by collaboration, social relevance, process and context” [1]
It was an avant-garde proposal, misunderstood at the time, arguing that the meaning of art should be found at its physical or social site, not in a museum, and it should involve its target audience, in order to turn it into a tool for social change. Continuar Leyendo →

Un mismo amor

Alberto Híjar Serrano
 
 
Without him knowing, or quoting from it, the Cannibal Manifiesto (São Paulo, 1928) gives aesthetic sense to the work of Gerardo Cantú exhibited at Museo Mural Diego Rivera under the title Un mismo amor. Vivencias y videncias. Among the phrases adroitly sprinkled here and there to accompany the works, there is one highlighted in red on the triptych that substitutes the catalogue: “with Cantú we arrive at the awkwardness of love, but love still, and perhaps a love more sincere and higher than that which the romantics exalted in their time”, says Ida Rodríguez. Continuar Leyendo →

Raquel Tibol

Alberto Híjar Serrano
 
 
The introduction to the anthology Raquel Tibol, la crítica y la militancia, published by Centro de Estudios del Movimiento Obrero y Socialista, recounts the life and miracles of the redoubtable critic, from her beginnings as a writer and journalist in her native Argentina. During a Continental Conference on Culture, promoted by Pablo Neruda in Santiago, Chile, in 1952, she met Diego Rivera and decided to accept the task of organizing the Mexican section. Her quick, efficient and clear writing style opened the path for her to join projects aimed at achieving national liberation and socialism.
Continuar Leyendo →

Building an Utopia

Laura González Matute
 
 

This text was read on June 9, 2016, at Aula Magna José Vasconcelos, Centro Nacional de las Artes, during the presentation of the book La construcción de una utopía. Enseñanza artística en la posrevolución (Building an Utopia. Arts Education After the Revolution), Mexico, Conaculta, INBA, Cenidiap, 2015, 168 p.
Continuar Leyendo →

An artistic relationship and a great friendship between a muralist and an adman: Jorge González Camarena and Federico Sánchez Fogarty

María Teresa Favela Fierro
 
 
This is the text of the lecture “Tolteca’s public image in the work of Jorge González Camarena”, which I gave on the occasion of the exhibition Federico Sánchez Fogarty, a visionary of his time at Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo, (November 14, 2013, February 23, 2014). You can see the images I mention in the text at the gallery of the Fundación Cultural Jorge González Camarena A. C. website: Galería de la Fundación Cultural Jorge González Camarena. Continuar Leyendo →

Boltanski. Un pueblo de fantasmas

Marie-Christine Camus
 
 
This text was read at a round table, “Incomplete traces. Identity, memory and oblivion”, on May 24, 2016, as a parallel activity to the exhibition Animitas. Christian Boltanski, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, January 21 – June 5, 2016.
  Continuar Leyendo →

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Vicente Kramsky: a local photographer

Gabriela Torres Freyermuth

 
 
Vicente Kramsky was born in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, in 1929. His family was of German descent. His grandfather, Vicente Kramsky Bittner, arrived in Mexico in 1870 after the Mexican government had extended an invitation to foreigners to come and people the country. He soon decided to try his luck in San Cristóbal, where he met Emilia Ramos Bourdois, whom he married. They founded the La Sultana shoe factory, which became renowned in the whole region. This commercial success provided the family with great prestige and a distinguished social position. A sign of the family’s prosperity was the purchase of the country estate known as “El Tívoli”.[1] Continuar Leyendo →

Work Brings Us Together: Larrauri/Mexiac

On April 20, 2016, at Galería Víctor Manuel Contreras in Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (UAEM), campus Cuernavaca, the exhibition Work Brings Us Together. One More Time, was opened. It brought together two sets of works from two essential creators in the history of art and culture in Mexico: Moments in the History of Mexico. Illustrations by Iker Larrauri, and Illustration in the work of Adolfo Mexiac.
Continuar Leyendo →

SPECULAR – second series

Fictive Criticism

Alfredo Gurza

Invaluable images from the collections kept by Cenidiap, in dialogue with fabulations and inventions, free-style exercises of the imagination, as mirrors reflecting each other, revealing unexpected affinities and contrasts, interweavings beneath the surface, telling resonances. A proposal to re-circulate this heritage, in order to contribute to generating new audiences and strengthening the Center as a reference point for the national and international community of researchers, documentalists and creators. Continuar Leyendo →

SPECULAR

Fictive Criticism

ALFREDO GURZA

 

In line with Cenidiap’s essential mission to produce and foster research, documentation and information on visual arts in Mexico and the rest of the world, we present this series, where we will be periodically publishing images from the invaluable archives housed in our Center, placing them in conversation with fabulations and inventions, free-form exercises of the imagination, as mirrors in reciprocal reflection, revealing unexpected affinities and contrasts, interweavings beneath the surface, telling resonances. Continuar Leyendo →

THREE BY MALEVICH

Alfredo Gurza
 
 
The dazzling Russian avant-garde exhibition at the Fine Arts Palace in Mexico City (October 22, 2015-February 7, 2016) provides a perfect opportunity to present three articles by Kazimir Malevich, the creator of suprematism, whose influence on the critical practice of the arts is perhaps greater today than it was a century ago, when the depths of his work were only beginning to be sounded. Continuar Leyendo →

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A figuration of outrage

Alfredo Gurza
 
 
In June, 2015, at Café 123, Suad, an artist born in Casablanca, Morocco, residing in Mexico City since 2010, exhibited through the One Month | One Artist initiative her piece entitled Entrelazados, (Entwined), a work that distills her artistic practice, accumulated through successive purifying and deepening processes in her studious journey through Lyon, London and New York. It is also the announcement of her new domain: both as knowledge/craft and as a territory for semiotic research. Continuar Leyendo →

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A Memorial to Violence

Cristina Híjar González
 
 
A year after the forced disappearance of the 43 students of Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos of Ayotzinapa, and the brutal murder of three others, the slogans of the day are:
They took them away alive, we want them back alive! The State did it! Continuar Leyendo →

Approaches to Political Graphic Art as Discourse

In the late 1970’s, Mario Benedetti wrote the poetry collection Letras de emergencia, which included a prologue under the title “Canto libre y arte de emergencia”, [“Free Song and Emergency Art”].(1) In it, he stresses the urgent need to raise one’s voice against unreason, expressly alluding to the song by Daniel Viglietti, who was at that time a political prisoner in Uruguay. I see no objection to extending the poet’s considerations to all artistic expressions raising from the terrible conjunctures of our histories. Benedetti states that someone will not fail to wonder how we can have the time and the willingness to sing, paint or dance; he points out that these expressions produce an aesthetic effect, interpellate in another way, bring us affectively closer, build a community: Continuar Leyendo →

Exhibition Morphologies. Fine Arts Palace Museum: 1934-2014

Ana Garduño
 
 
Curatorial policy at what is today known as the Fine Arts Palace Museum has always been particularly notorious when it comes to the visual arts; this is due in large measure to its status as an official art gallery. Its exhibitions have had greater cultural significance, not only in its natural area of influence, Mexico City, but also in the interior of the country. Historiographically, the success of its montages, especially those that received positive evaluations by both specialists and the general public, have even radiated over cultural capitals with a certain museistic power, above all in Latin America. Continuar Leyendo →

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43 Times Seven Months

Alberto Híjar Serrano
 
 
Certain that the State did it, commemorations rise up a notch, developing autonomies and self-governance. On Saturday the 25th, the Santo Domingo, Los Pedregales, neighborhood welcomed the Ayotzinapa parents, and as it has done every month for the past nine years, a survivor from the Acteal massacre, who is enduring an unending rehab process because of the seven bullets she received. There was delicious pozole and tamales, followed by a testimonial reflection and the report made by the neighborhood organizations. In solidarity, one of the houses now shows on its metal gate the faces of the 43. Twenty-five collective murals testify to this solidarity; some of them include portraits of the victims, their names, and their mothers bearing these testimonials. One of the murals reproduces an engraving by Arturo García Bustos, dating from over fifty years ago, with an armed Zapata pointing directly at the spectator and a sign that reads: “And what have you done to defend the conquests for which we gave our lives?” Continuar Leyendo →

Galeano

Alberto Híjar Serrano
 
 
Open Veins of Latin America rightly replaced those linear-history manuals, centered on Nation-State building and with only veiled references to colonial and imperial outrages. Official texts never mention guerrillas and bandits: they are the dirty war, a side chapter beyond presidents and laws. Continuar Leyendo →

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We shall become Dogs

Yuri Herrera
 
 
A text on La Pasión según Arte Huerco, an exhibition initially shown in Pachuca, Hidalgo, by Fundación Arturo Herrera Cabañas, in April, 2014. It was later exhibited between April and May, 2015, at the Copilco subway station, in Mexico City.  Continuar Leyendo →

Inventing the Future. Political Construction and Cultural Action. Acts of the V Symposium on Research and Documentation

Guadalupe Tolosa
 
 
The future can be invented, but maybe it emerges on the strength of a present in which the multiplicity of events –increasingly dominated by violence, which is present in virtually all aspects of life- turn the wager on aesthetic expressions into an opportunity to enrich the diverse and vast field in which we work, where the political, the ideological and the social are upturned. Continuar Leyendo →

Approaches to Patricia Henríquez

Alfredo Gurza
 
 
The incursion of Patricia Henríquez (Mexico City, 1967) in recent years in animation and video art is the logical consequence of her efforts to extend her semiotic domain. One is amazed by the terseness of her transit into this new medium, the naturalness with which she occupies it, as if these were her more propitious surroundings. Continuar Leyendo →

Pola Weiss and The Crystal Door

Alberto Roblest
 
 
My first encounter with Pola was as haphazard as my stay at UNAM’s Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales. Both chance events left their imprint on me forever. It was 1983, I was doing the fourth semester. It was near the end of term. Continuar Leyendo →

José Luis Brea’s “Looking ahead”

Loreto Alonso Atienza
 
 
On January 15-17, the “Three Eras of the Image” conference took place at Biblioteca Vasconcelos, in Mexico City. Organized by Centro de la Imagen and 17 Instituto de Estudios Críticos, it gathered major figures in the field of visual studies, such as Keith Moxey, William J. T Mitchell and Mieke Bal. The title of the conference was taken from the last book of the late Spanish thinker José Luis Brea. Continuar Leyendo →

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Current Art Documentary Collection

Edwina Moreno Guerra
 
 
1990-2000
 
The Current Art Documentary Collection began with the rescue of so-called “Arte Joven” (“Young Art”), originating in the late 1950’s. From then on, the cultivation of new languages always refers to new art, the one that broke off with tradition and was acknowledged as avant-garde. Continuar Leyendo →

The José María Velasco Gallery. A Public Space for Cultural Promotion in Tepito

Carlos Guevara Meza
 
 
This text was read at the presentation of the book La Galería José María Velasco. Espacio público de promoción cultural en Tepito, by Guillermina Guadarrama, México, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Galería José María Velasco, 2013. Galería Velasco. Continuar Leyendo →

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Vianney Cortés. Language as the Detonator of Form

 

The work of Vianney Cortés (Mexico City, 1985), who graduated from Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado La Esmeralda, fluctuates between sculpture and installation. Light and movement play a key role in her pieces, generating atmospheric and enveloping effects. Continuar Leyendo →

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Malraux Encounter on Art and Education

Loreto Alonso Atienza

 

The Malraux Encounter on Art and Education took place on May 6-8, 2014. It was coordinated by Patrick Talbot, honorary director of Art Postgraduate Schools of Bourges and Nancy, and of the National Higher School of Photography of France; and by Humberto Chávez Mayol, researcher at Cenidiap (National Center for Research, Documentation and Information on Visual Arts). Continuar Leyendo →

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On History and Relevancy: Luis Arenal

María Elisa Morales Maya

 

The exhibition Luis Arenal Bastar: un realismo militante (A Militant Realism) signifies in many senses, not just because of its unpublished status, given its documentary character, but because of the diversity of processes that the materialization of an exhibition such as this may imply. Continuar Leyendo →

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Francisco Goitia Collection

María Jeannette Méndez Ramón

 

Since 1987, the Francisco Goitia Collection became part of the artistic documentary heritage of the National Center for Research, Documentation and Information on Visual Arts (Cenidiap). It was donated by anthropologist Farías Galindo, the last executor and biographer of the artist. Continuar Leyendo →

Economics and Culture

Carlos Guevara Meza

 

Perhaps I should begin by pointing out the relevance of presenting a book entitled Economics and Culture at an arts research center. When “traditional” cultural producers, such as artists, intellectuals and academics, hear those two words together, we start shaking, thinking (not without reason) that the idea is to throw us into a market previously constructed by other agents, after their own fashion, in which they already exercise a dominion, and who don’t think twice about “liquidating” (in the Mafia sense of the word) any real or potential competition.

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Decentralizing Historical Photographic Collections

Eleazar López Zamora

 

[Originally published in Alberto Tovalín (ed.), Crónicas Fotográficas. I Foro México Estados Unidos,México, Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura, Universidad Veracruzana, Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1996.] Continuar Leyendo →

Forced Disappearances

Alberto Híjar Serrano

 

On the first Saturday of every month, at different public places, HIJOS México and ¡Eureka! Install an exhibition of the disappeared, the victims of political repression. On Saturday, February 1st, they installed photographs of the disappeared around a fountain in Parque de los Venados, where they informed the festive and sportive citizens gathered there of the purpose of their organization. Continuar Leyendo →

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The Cosmos Descends on Sculpture: Kiyoshi Takahashi, Sukemitzu Kaminaga, Kiyoto Ota and Hiroyuki Okumura

María Teresa Favela Fierro

 

Several Japanese artists have arrived in Mexico at different times; some settled definitely, others temporarily. They all have brought with them a valuable artistic legacy. Tamiji Kitagawa, for instance, lived here in the 1920´s and 30´s, and taught at the Open Air Painting Schools. Continuar Leyendo →

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Connections… Cenidiap’s Archives and Collections

 

On August 19-31, 2014, the Gallery of the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving “La Esmeralda” hosted the exhibition Connections… Cenidiap’s Archives and Collections. Continuar Leyendo →

César Moro: Poetry between the Old and New Worlds

Lourdes Andrade

 

César Moro, a poet of astonishing fertility in terms of the quantity and the quality of his images, is a figure between two worlds, drawn and torn by the absolute demands of poetry and the circumstances in which he developed his work and his life, and in which he gave sense to both. Continuar Leyendo →

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Barbizon or Santa Anita. The first Open Air Painting School, 1913

Laura González Matute

 

[Originally published in Escuelas de Pintura al Aire Libre y Centros Populares de Pintura, Mexico, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información de Artes Plásticas, 1987.] Continuar Leyendo →

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Leopoldo Méndez Documentary Collection

Jacqueline Romero Yescas

 

The Leopoldo Méndez Documentary Collection is a valuable documentary archive for research into the visual arts in 20th century Mexico. Its information covers several issues regarding the life and thought, as well as the development of the work of this engraver. This collection is part of the cultural, historical and artistic heritage safeguarded by the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL). Continuar Leyendo →