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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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
