Latino/a Visual Imaginary: Intersection of Word & Image

Latino/a Visual Imaginary Intersection of Word & Image

Latino/a Visual Imaginary Intersection of Word & Image

Curated by Dr. Holly Barnet-Sanchez

February 19 – May 14, 2011 In conjunction with the Latino/a Imaginary collaboration organized by 516 ARTS & UNM College of Fine Arts

516 Central Avenue SW Downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico www.516arts.org

Introduction

A ll of us at 516 ARTS are honored to welcome special visiting artists

This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Hector A. Torres 1955 - 2010

“The questions I pose these writers revolve around issues of language and of life between languages, of the creative drive that leads them to their crafts and commits them to their art.”

— Hector A. Torres Professor of English, the University of New Mexico

Conversations with Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Writers, UNM Press, 2007, p.5

Pepón Osorio and Amalia Mesa-Bains and the group of accomplished, intergenerational artists from New Mexico and across the United States who are featured in Latino/a Visual Imaginary: Intersection of Word & Image. This exhibition was inspired by the bi-regional conference titled Latino Literary Imagination: East Coast/South West Dialogue on Narrative Voices and the Spoken Word, taking place this spring in New Jersey at Rutgers University and in Albuquerque hosted by the University of New Mexico (College of Arts & Sciences and College of Fine Arts) and the National Hispanic Cultural Center. The conference was developed by a partnership between the University of New Mexico, the National Hispanic Cultural Center, Rutgers University and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

In the spirit of collaboration, the exhibition is accompanied by a series of exhibits and public programs for the Latino/a Imaginary project in Albuquerque this spring, also inspired by the conference. We are pleased to partner with the Albuquerque Museum, the National Hispanic Cultural Center, the Outpost Performance Space, Tamarind Institute and UNM College of Fine Arts and Zimmerman Library to offer related exhibitions, talks, workshops, readings and performances throughout the exhibition.

I would like to especially thank guest curator Holly Barnet-Sanchez for her vision and leadership on this project, and the wealth of others involved from its inception including the LLI UNMN/NHCC faculty, staff and graduate student working group who developed the Albuquerque part of the conference and the administrators and faculty working group at Rutgers University. It is also important to thank Miguel Algarin, emeritus professor of English at Rutgers and co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in 1973, and Albuquerque-based poet Jimmy Santiago Baca who originated the entire project by their desire to honor their colleague and friend Rudolfo Anaya for his extraordinary accomplishments as a writer, educator and mentor of Latino/a writers everywhere. This exhibition would not have been possible without new national funding support to 516 ARTS from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, as well as continuing support from the McCune Charitable Foundation, The FUNd at Albuquerque Community Foundation, and project support from The University of New Mexico, Provost Office Regents Endowment and College of Fine Arts.

Suzanne Sbarge Executive Director, 516 ARTS

These works... cross generations and territories. They engage

Narrative Voices and Visions Qualities of Eloquence in Latino/a Art

Getting the humor also means understanding cultural referents and getting inside the sensibility of that group, culture or nation. While the Latino/a Visual Imaginary exhibition is not about the varieties of humor throughout Latino/a communities of the United States, it does invite the visitor to enter into the experience and meanings of the works of art found here; to engage in the processes of viewing, contemplating and deciphering.

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The Latino/a visual imaginary is rich in its narrative qualities, frequently combining image and text as integral to both formal and conceptual aspects of a work of art. Language, or multiple languages, alphabets and mixed forms — such as hybrid Meso-American glyphs, Nahuatl, Spanish, English, Caló and Spanglish, often displayed in Chicano/a and Latino/a art (and literature) through code-switching — are woven through, etched into or inscribed onto textiles, sculptures, prints, paintings and furniture as essential, layering and complicating form and meaning. Here, they can even be heard at the press of a button, or on one’s smart phone via an access code. These phrases, quips and quotations, rants and cries for help, poems and observations, bits and pieces of recuperated and recorded family memories, palimpsest notations, legal and historical documents, medicinal compounds and botanical descriptions connect artists to their communities and to gallery visitors. They bring us face to face with the inescapable, profoundly complex and difficult relationships between categories of language: the visual — in two or three dimensions — and the written/spoken word as they play out within and across these works of art. Ultimately, what this focus on the rich intersection of the visual, the verbal and the textual does here is to offer us multiple pathways for contemplating and understanding aspects and qualities of the varied and complex Latino/a lived and creative experiences within the United States.

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sacred, between the effects of wealth and poverty, illness and health. They talk about individuals and community, sexuality, powerlessness and reclamation of power.

by Dr. Holly Barnet-Sanchez

A marker of truly knowing a language is to get the humor.

opposites in conversations between the secular and the

Differing approaches to narrative can represent the need to create new languages to express old ways of being within new contexts, new ways of negotiating the world or new ways of making art. Just as the literary conference that inspired this exhibition sets out to celebrate and scrutinize the legacies of writers such as Piri Thomas and Rudolfo Anaya, both of whom helped create regional languages of latinidad in the 1960s and 1970s, the Latino/a Visual Imaginary exhibition affords us the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the work of Latino/a artists who have helped create new visual vocabularies.2 Amalia Mesa-Bains recuperates old, frequently marginalized and virtually disappeared or invisible practices. She deliberately combines traditional art forms of the home altar and the ofrenda, with contemporary

Amalia Mesa-Bains, Ancient Cartographies, 2011, giclée print, 22 x 28 inches

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“high art” forms such as conceptual, multi-media site specific installations.3 She writes about the work of fellow Chicana artists, and has identified and defined domesticana, a strain of critical discourse that is able to cross from Chicana visual arts to literary analysis.4 Her current work revolves around interconnections found in the healing practices of curanderas, women intimately in tune with nature and the earth through use of botanicals and other natural components. She champions preservation of such ancient knowledge in specialized archives and libraries, continuing her devotion to recuperating, maintaining and appreciating once discredited wisdom.

Pepón Osorio is celebrated for his community engagement through art making, for his compelling and demanding installations that give form and speak to places, people, and social conditions rarely considered in the gallery or museum: urban Nuyorican and Puerto Rican domestic spaces, offices, barber shops, jail cells, the Spanish Conquest of the Americas and tropical fantasies. They are deliberately located both in traditional galleries and in commercial venues such as department stores or empty car dealerships to expand possible audience viewing and participation. His installations are composed of “visual sentences and phrases” to illuminate the lives lived and the conditions faced in those locations. Most recently he has sought to understand and express (through a year-long, on-site collective process) the challenges of ill health and economic downturns facing a new set of families and communities in more rural North Adams and Williamstown, Massachusetts.5 José Montoya, co-founder of the storied Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) art collective, always combines his poetry, political activism and community engagement, with his drawings, murals, prints and music.6 Represented here are additional veterano/as of the Chicano civil rights and arts movements, Yreina Cervantez and “Spain” Rodriguez.

Cervantez combines self-portraiture with representation of women from all walks of life, throughout the Americas and over millennia. She ties ancient Mesoamerican knowledge, spirituality and artistic practices to 6

Pepón Osorio, Drowned in a Glass of Water (detail), 2010, mixed media installation

modern and contemporary feminine creativity, activism and power.7 Mesa-Bains, Cervantez and many other Chicana artists work within the context of re-membering and re-imagining their collective lives, spirits and bodies.8 In stark contrast, Rodriguez brings the revolutionary 1960s and the Chicano/a Movement to the world of underground comics.

The younger generations of Chicana/os and Nuyoricans — heirs of the heady years of political and artistic activism in East LA, San Francisco, Albuquerque and El Barrio in New York, of the creation of Self-Help Yreina Cervantez, Mi Neplanta, 1995, lithograph, 24 x 18 inches

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Humor, pathos, irony, sensuality, a refusal to be silenced and invisible, triumph and celebration, are markers of the works in this exhibition.

Graphics, the Galeria de la Raza, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, The Museo del Barrio and the Taller Boricua — continue that process, playing with the intersection of multiple visual and verbal vocabularies.9 Viva Paredes combines the traditions of hand-blown glass and the gathering of herbs and grains for the healing work of the curandera or for the excruciating embodiment of a highly personalized ancient/contemporary auto-sacrifice. Her work visualizes voicelessness or the loss of language when crossing borders, the falling-through-the-cracks between the old and new languages, or the denial of permission to speak in one’s familiar tongue. These tongues offer the antidote, a healing process.

Kai Margarida-Ramírez de Arellano, whose family is originally from Puerto Rico, was trained and mentored in New Mexico by the traditional papel picado master Catalina Delgado Trunk, building as well on the innovations of Chicana artists such as those of Carmen Lomas Garza.10 Margarida-Ramírez de Arellano has adopted this traditional Mexican

ephemeral decoration for fiestas and rituals as her carefully considered medium of choice with which she pays homage to treasured family histories while also tweaking pop culture phenomena, art historical practice and religious devotion. She creates an eloquent, savage image of the ongoing atrocities against women not so very far away: the bi-national tragedy of the murdered women in Juárez.

Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz works as a completely contemporary performance artist in Ask Chuleta, presenting Bronx-accented, street-wise Latina video lectures on contemporary art (topics include the white-cube gallery and a comparative analysis of Jackson Pollack and Frida Kahlo). She combines graffiti and graphic novels in her very own super hero, Wepa Woman. Elena Baca experiments with media new to her, non-toxic materials that serve to layer her histories and recent experiences with illness and healing. Santos Contreras works with a community of the elderly to create a found-object, high tech, interactive collective history of the South Valley in Albuquerque.

Literally through the inclusion of text — decipherable or not — or through visual narratives, these works conduct conversations that “speak” of and to numerous relationships. They cross generations and territories.

They engage opposites in conversations between the secular and the sacred, between the effects of wealth and poverty, illness and health.

They talk about individuals and community, sexuality, powerlessness and reclamation of power. Finally, they present the conflict between power holders who claim the right to speak for others, and for those who engage across and against that privileged position. Humor, pathos, irony, sensuality, a refusal to be silenced and invisible, triumph and celebration, are markers of the works in this exhibition.

Collectively, the expression of these Latino/a artists addresses multiple kinds of violence (physical, psychology, spiritual, historical — individual

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Kai Margarida-Ramírez de Arellano, Juárez, 2010, cut paper, 22.25 x 23 inches

Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, WW: The Exile Series, 2008, ink on paper, 40 x 32 inches

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An essential collectivity woven throughout the very fabric of the exhibition is that of the traditional healers, curanderas and curanderos... along with the people they serve in barrios and colonias across the United States. and communal), loss, recuperation, healing, spirituality, protection, survival, subversion, community, memory, the assertion and validation of one’s history, culture and active presence in the world. An overarching theme draws together various qualities of violence, loss, recuperation, illness and healing as exemplified by distinct, but complementary installations The Curandera’s Botánica, its ante-room, The Botanical Archive by Amalia Mesa-Bains, and Drowned in a Glass of Water, by Pepón Osorio. This larger theme is also visible in the papal picado pieces

by Kai Margarida-Ramírez de Arellano, the layered mixed-media works

by Elena Baca, the Pocha Tongue series of Viva Paredes, and the Wepa Woman drawings by Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz.

Violence, loss, recuperation, illness and healing are profound and essential personal and social elements within the novels Bless Me Ultima, (1972) by Rudolfo Anaya, and Down These Mean Streets (1967), by Piri Thomas.11 They are integral to the poems and prose of writers Gloria Anzaldúa, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Ana Castillo, Cherríe Moraga, Pedro Pietri, Miguel Piñero and many others.

Community is another significant theme threading through this exhibition and the Latino/a literary imagination as well, one that is both ubiquitous and variously configured. This thematic and human connection crosses time and territory, referring to elderly residents of neighborhoods such as Albuquerque’s South Valley, contrasting families in disparate Massachusetts towns and to self-selected communities of women artists and activists. A more informal, yet essential collectivity woven throughout the very fabric of the exhibition is that of the traditional healers, curanderas/os, such as the title character of Ultima, in Anaya’s classic Bless Me Ultima, along with the people they serve in barrios and colonias across the United States. Also seen here are the appointed and selfdefined conservators of arcane and mysterious knowledge and the onceforgotten, invisible and neglected women lost to the horrific violence of 10

Right: Amalia Mesa-Bains, The Curandera’s Botánica (detail) 2008, mixed media installation, 20 x 6 x 10 feet

Juárez. Not to be overlooked are the pop culture junkies or aficionados of comics, graphic novels, superheroes and luchadores (masked Mexican wrestlers), and the cross-temporal communities of mytho-historical heroes of el movimiento chicano: Emiliano Zapata y el Pachucho.

As diverse as these communities are, they also overlap and connect. They draw upon multiple languages from the wisdom, ritual practice and visual/verbal languages of the Aztec and the Maya in their mostly destroyed codices and surviving hieroglyphic inscriptions, the Latin of botanical descriptions and ecclesiastical knowledge, to visual sentences and phrases of multi-dimensional, mixed-media installations, traditional media such as papel picado and protective milagros, the spiritual and aesthetic remembering/re-imagining by feminist artists and writers, activist political imagery and rhetoric, cinematic vocabulary of film noir translated to that of the contemporary graphic novel and finally, to urban street-savvy with a Bronx feminist twist. The works of art in this exhibition invite us all to explore the eloquence of the Latino/a visual imaginary.

Dr. Holly Barnet-Sanchez, Curator of Latino/a Visual Imaginary: Intersection of Word & Image, is Associate Professor, Chicano/a, Latino/a and Latin American Art History and Associate Dean, College of Fine Arts at University of New Mexico.

Author of books and articles on murals, graphic arts and art criticism, she is twice a recipient of Rockefeller Fellowships at University of Texas at Austin (1996) and Bellagio, Italy (2004). She incorporates literature into her courses and research.

Barnet-Sanchez received a Ph.D. from the University of California-Los Angeles where she focused on pre-Columbian art history and its modern incorporation into U.S. museums. She continues to work as a guest curator and has written extensively on Chicano/a and Latino/a murals and graphic arts.

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END NOTES 1. I would like to thank the writers and artists who inspired this exhibition, particular those whose works are included here and who always challenge both my head and heart. I would also like to acknowledge the hard work and sense of adventure of the staff of 516 ARTS, the Executive Director Suzanne Sbarge, Assistant Director Rhiannon Mercer, Education Coordinator Claude Smith and Program Coordinator Teresa Buscemi. I want to express my appreciation of the members of the UNM/NHCC Working Group, who have made the entire Latino Imaginary enterprise possible and a pleasure over the past two years. Finally, I would like to remember Hector Torres, professor of English and a LLI colleague, who we lost to murder in spring 2010. He is missed.

2. Latino Literary Imagination: East Coast / South West Dialogue on Narrative Voices and the Spoken Word is a collaborative, two-part conference organized by a partnership between the faculty of the University of New Mexico and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, along with the National Hispanic Cultural Center and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. It is scheduled for April 7-8, 2011 at Rutgers, and April 15-16, 2011 at UNM and the NHCC. 3. Jennifer A. González, “Rhetoric of the Object: Material Memory and the Artwork of Amalia Mesa-Bains,” Visual Anthropology Review, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 1993, pp. 84-91; Jennifer A. González, Chapter 3, “Amalia MesaBains: Divine Allegories,” Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2008, pp.120-162.4. Amalia Mesa Bains, “Domesticana: The Sensibility of the Chicana Rasquache,” in Trisha Ziff, ed. Distant Relations, New York: Smart Art Press, 1995, pp. 156-163.

5. Con To’ Los Hierros, A Retrospective of the Work of Pepón Osorio, New York: El Museo del Barrio, 1991. Anna Indych, “Nuyorican Baroque: Pepón Osorio’s Chucherias,” http://www.puertorico-herald.org/issues/2001/vol5n18/Nuyoricanen.shtml, pp. 1-10. Jennifer A. González, Chapter 4 “Pepón Osorio: No Limits,” Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2008, pp. 164-202. Drowned in a Glass of Water – Pepón Osorio: North Adams and Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2010-2011, commissioned by Williams College Museum of Art, curated by Cynthia Way, the museum’s Director of Education and Visitor Experience.

6. The Royal Chicano Air Force was established by artists and educators José Montoya and Esteban Villa, faculty at Sacramento State University (now California State University, Sacramento) in 1969, along with one of their students, Ricardo Favela. Originally known as the Rebel Chicano Art Front, the RCAF is one of the numerous Chicano art collectives created throughout the United States during the years of the civil rights and art movements. It is still operational with its Centro de Artistas Chicanos and its Galería Posada, and many community-based education programs. Historically it has been closely aligned with the United Farm Workers Union and other organizing efforts.

8. Several Chicana artists and writers come to mind when considering the concept of remembering. Foremost among them are those who have employed the metaphor of reconstituting Coyolxauhqui for the process of reconstituting the Chicana self. These include the writer Cherríe Moraga and the artist Irene Pérez. Coyolxauhqui, the daughter of Coatlicue, Aztec earth goddess, was the goddess of the moon, who was dismembered by her brother, Huitzilopochtli, god of war and the sun god. Her massive stone sculpture,excavated at the base of the Templo Mayor in Mexico City, presents her as entirely dismembered.

See. Moraga, “El mito azteca,” in Ana Castillo, ed. Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, New York: Riverhead Books, 1996, pp.

68-71; and “Coyolxauqui Re-Membered,” La Raza Women’s Journal, La Raza Studies Department, San Francisco State University,1996 Double Edition. Cover painting by Irene Pérez, “My Indígena Self: a talk with Chicana Artist Irene Pérez,

by Theresa Harlan, pp. 1-6. See also, Laura E. Pérez, Chicana Art: the Politics of spiritual and aesthetic altarities, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.

9. Yasmin Ramírez, “Parallel Lives, Striking Differences,” Pressing the Point: Parallel Expressions in the Graphic Arts of the Chicano and Puerto Rican Movements, curated by Yasmin Ramírez and Henry Estrada, New York: el Museo del Barrio, 1999, pp. 10-19.

10. See http://www.calaca-arts.com for information on the work of Catalina Delgado Trunk. See also, Congdon, K. G., Delgado-Trunk, C., and Lopez, M. “Teaching About the Ofrenda and Experiences on the Border.” Studies in Art Education, Volume 40(4). 1999.Delgado-Trunk, C., Van Etten de Sánchez, S. Crossings, Origins and Celebrations of Día de los Muertos, National Hispanic Cultural Center. For information on Carmen Lomas Garza see Tomás YbarraFrausto and Terecita Romo, Carmen Lomas Garza, Lo Real Maravilloso – The Marvelous/The Real, San Francisco: The Mexican Museum, 1987; Carment Lomas Garza and Amalia Mesa-Bains, A Piece of My Heart / Pedacito de me Corazón, the Art of Carmen Lomas Garza, New York and Austin: The New Press and the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, 1991; and The Chicano Codices: Encountering Art of the Americas, San Francisco: The Mexican Museum, 1992.

11. Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967, and Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me Ultima, Berkeley: TQS Publications, 1972.

7. Laura E. Pérez, “Spirit Glyphs: Reimagining Art and Artist in the Work of Chicana Tlamatinime,” Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 44, Number 1, 1998, pp.

36-76.

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Kai Margarida-RamĂ­rez de Arellano, El Santo, 2010, cut paper 13.5 x 10.5 inches

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Kai Margarida-RamĂ­rez de Arellano, La Novia del Santo, 2010, cut paper 13.5 x 10.5 inches

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Amalia Mesa-Bains, Badius Botanicals I, 2011, giclĂŠe print, 28 x 22 inches

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Amalia Mesa-Bains, Badius Botanicals: Bracero, 2011, giclĂŠe print, 28 x 22 inches

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Yreina Cervantez, Neplanta, 1995, lithograph, 24 x 18 inches

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Yreina Cervantez, Beyond Neplanta, 1995, lithograph, 24 x 18 inches

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Elena Baca Albuquerque, New Mexico

“I have always been captivated by storytelling and oral history, which somehow led me to eavesdropping and fascination with the complexities of conversation. I am interested in abstraction and perception associated with words, photographs and mixed media. Written word has always inspired because it can coincide, justify or define an experience. These images are an intersection of my search for a new process to work in that is familiar, experiences over the last six years, examining the repetition of doodles, my unconscious, and my translation to form images.”

Elena Baca is coming to terms with how important process is to her and discovering new ways of working. After years of being in denial about how much she loved alternative photographic processes, she had to give them up for health reasons. The magic in everyday occurrences is analogous with the abstract quality of her work. She continues to be inspired by her experiences working as an educator at Explora Science Center, and other personal stories. She represents District 3 for Bernalillo County 1% Public Art Program. Her work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally.

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5 ½ Years, 2011, mixed media on panel, 24 x 24 inches

Yreina D. Cervantez Los Angeles, California

“My artwork reflects over 40 years of exploration and the development of an iconography influenced by diverse creative and cultural expressions... A complex layering of symbolism and text from many sources characterize my compositions; inscribed testimonies imbued with spiritual and political meanings. I am inspired by Mesoamerican religion, mythology and cosmology, and the Pre-Columbian indigenous pictorial manuscripts/codices or amoxtli of the Aztec, Mixtec and the Maya... My work also relates to themes of Sacred Space, Xicana/Latina agency and the decolonized feminine body as a contested space and site of transformation.”

Yreina D. Cervantez is a third generation Chicana working in painting, printmaking and muralism. She earned a B.A. in Fine Arts from U.C. Santa Cruz (1975) and an M.F.A. from U.C.L.A. (1989), and is presently teaching as a full professor in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at California State University at Northridge. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her work appears in numerous books and publications including Chicana Art: the politics of spiritual and aesthetic altarities, by Laura E. Pérez, and Walls of Empowerment:Chicana/o Indigenous Murals of California by Guisela Latorre.

Mujer de mucha enagua, Pa’ Ti Xicana, 1999, lithograph,17.25 x 25.5 inches

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Santos Contreras

Kai Margarida-Ramírez de Arellano

Albuquerque, New Mexico

“Here-Stories: A Collective Look at Place and Time was inspired by a workshop that I co-facilitated for senior citizens at the Holy Family Church meal site in Albuquerque’s South Valley. The seniors were empowered to share their lives through spoken word and images. My piece commemorates the histories of their childhoods, adult lives and the community of which they are still very much a part. The sculpture serves as a metaphorical and physical framework, in which these stories can continuously be seen from different perspectives. Through the use of diverse materials and technologies, I have carefully explored narratives surrounding place and time.”

Santos Contreras is a New Mexico Department of Higher Education Graduate Fellow working towards his M.A. in Art Education. He graduated with honors from New Mexico State University with a B.F.A.. He was commissioned to design a bus stop that infused both artistic elements and the practicality of a bus stop in Las Cruces. His work has been exhibited at juried exhibitions throughout the state. Santos has taught art through Art in the Schools and the Albuquerque Academy Summer Program. The piece in this exhibition was commissioned for the new South Valley Multipurpose Center in Albuquerque.

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Here-Stories: A Collective Look at Place and Time (detail) 2011, mixed media, 28 x 120 x 6 iches

New York, New York

“My Puerto Rican roots deeply inform my artwork. I often draw from photographs of my grandmother’s family, taken by my great-great-grandmother, establishing intergenerational collaborations with my ancestors. Drawing from Mexican folk art and my family history, I examine my experience of walking the line between cultures. These cultural contradictions are dissected further by sexual over- (sometimes under-) tones. Papel picado is an irreverent medium combining an eclectic history, foreshadowing the language of stencil art, and bridging an analog form of drawing and cutting with an almost digital sense of positive and negative space.”

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Albuquerque, Margarida-Ramírez de Arellano uses the intersection of Caribbean and Chicano culture as the stage for her work. At the University of New Mexico, she began to fuse her art with her interest in social issues, focusing on art as protest and a tool of empowerment. She studied papel picado with master Catalina Delgado-Trunk and uses it as an expansion of her work in mixed media and collage. Her work is in the National Hispanic Cultural Center’s permanent collection and has been shown in New Mexico and New York City, where she is based.

Ozon, 2010, cut paper, 20 x 16 inches

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Amalia Mesa-Bains Marina, California

“The Curandera’s Botánica and the Botanical Archive are focused on themes of nature and healing within the spiritual landscape of the Americas..., exploring the traditions of curanderismo, which include the inseparability of the mind and body, the connection between the natural and supernatural and the collective cure and the power of the soul. The Botanical Archive is a new piece developed as an ante-room to The Curandera’s Botánica. It recalls the long history of ancient plants, healing plants and the agricultural life of Mexicans. The plants anchor themes of sustenance and survival and remind us of our spiritual landscape and of our origins on the continent.”

Amalia Mesa-Bains is an artist, educator and cultural critic. Her art work, primarily interpretations of traditional Chicano altars, has been exhibited in national and international venues, including the National Museum of American Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museo del Barrio, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as museums in France, Sweden, Ireland and Denmark. MesaBains has received numerous awards.She is Professor Emerita at California State University at Monterey Bay.

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Amalia Mesa-Bains, Badius Botanicals II, 2011, giclée print, 28 x 22 inches

José Montoya Sacramento, California

Widely respected as one of the original voices in Chicano literature and as a key early formative figure in the Chicano art movement, José Montoya is famous for his use of code-switching between languages in his poems and essays. As a writer, painter, printmaker, muralist and musician, his primary “character” has been the Pachuco culture he grew up around in Albuquerque and Fresno. Originally a native of Chilili, New Mexico, Montoya received a B.F.A. from the California College of Arts & Crafts and an M.F.A. from Sacramento State University. He is best known as a cofounder of the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) art collective. Committed to community education and political activism, Montoya and the RCAF created several barrio programs and worked with the United Farm Workers Union and other political/labor organizations. In the 1980s, Montoya formed the musical ensemble, Trio Casindio. He is an emeritus faculty member at California State University, Sacramento.

Twin Double-Barrel Shotgun (detail), 1990, printed by Carolee Campbell at Ninja Press, edition of 75, 15 x 22 inches

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Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz Orlando, Florida

“The work I make isn’t exactly for everyone. Or maybe it is... because I’ve made work about the folks we don’t see, the chambermaids in hotels or the inner city mother of three that is thrown in a tizzy because she can’t seem to get a cab for her and her kids. I have built my artistic career by creating works that investigate notions of otherness as a Latina in the United States.

Starting from personal experiences, I set out to dissect aspects of my heritage from varying points of entry, from within my own family, home and neighborhood. These investigations became larger studies on otherness in American culture.”

Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz is an award winning interdisciplinary artist whose trans- genre work spans video, performance art, installation, drawing, mural making and spoken word. She received an M.F.A. from Rutgers, and has exhibited internationally, most recently in MANIFESTA 8 in Spain and Trampolim in Brazil among others. She has received many awards, including El Diario/ La Prensa’s 2008 Mujeres Destacada Honor. She is a Skowhegan School and Ralph Bunche fellow and is a professor of art at the University of Central Florida.

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Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, WW: The Exile Series - Plagued with Fractured Memories and Excruciating Headaches, She Found Herself Miserably Alone and Afraid (detail), 2008 ink on paper, 40 x 32 inches

Pepón Osorio Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“I am weaving together stories of community. I am interested in democratizing the artistic process. It’s not just about what I achieve from making the art, but about what the participants can discover about themselves through their involvement. Drowned in a Glass of Water, represents the stories of two families, transforming personal memory into collective narrative....

Overwhelming in scale and detail, Drowned in a Glass of Water challenges viewers to negotiate their relationship to the artwork and the place of art in their lives.”

Pepón Osorio is best known for his large-scale installations merging conceptual art and community dynamics. His work emphasizes the exhibition space as an intermediary between the social architecture of communities and the mainstream art world. He has worked with more than 25 communities across the U.S. and internationally, creating installations based on real life experiences. Diffusing the boundaries between the traditional and the contemporary, Osorio emphasizes a freedom in process and content with an exacting use of collected rescued materials to create provocative large-scale, multi-media installations. He is Professor at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia.

Drowned in a Glass of Water (detail), 2010, mixed media installation, 18 x 18 x 18 feet, commissioned by the Williams College Museum of Art, curated by Cynthia Way

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Viva Paredes San Francisco, California

“My work comes from a deep sense of belonging to something greater than the self. Through the art making process, natural materials are transformed into conversations involving the artwork and viewer. In My Pocha Tongues, blown glass vessels of various dimensions are filled with different medicinal herbs that are used to treat ailments of the tongue, the mouth, the breath or lungs, shedding light on the trauma of losing language. Though my own experience with dyslexia and the societal denial of my mother tongue, the installation is intended to inspire healing, forgiveness and self acceptance.”

Viviana (Viva) Paredes, a Bay Area native, is a graduate of California College of the Arts (2001) with an emphasis in sculpture. Influenced by her grandmother, a native of Chihuahua, México, she was initiated into the ancient tradition of medicinal plants and curanderismo. Her work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and México. In Texcoco, México, Paredes’ work was part of the 2008 Chapingo Biennial, Arts with Roots in the Earth. In 2010, her work was featured as part of an exhibition series at the Triton Museum of Santa Clara called Bay Area Chicana.

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My Flaming Tongue (detail), 2009, glass, chili pods, fiber, agave thorns 103 x 6.5 x 15.75 inches

Spain Rodriguez San Francisco, California

Originally from Buffalo, New York, Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez, first gained recognition as one of the founders of the underground commix movement of the 1960s. He began his career in New York, drawing for the East Village Other, later moving to San Francisco where he worked at Zap Comics with Robert Crumb and other artists. Best known for autobiographical and political stories, he created the first underground tabloid, Zodiac Mindwarp, and his character, Trashman, Agent of the Sixth International, became an icon in 1960s underground newspapers. He participated in the early Chicano art movement, painting an exterior cartoon mural in 1972 in the Mission District. In 1992, he created the Codex ‘Spain’: Mexico and Me for the Mexican Museum exhibition, The Chicano Codices. Recently he worked on the online graphic novel Dark Hotel at sfgate.com, completed the graphic novel Nightmare Alley, based on the noir film classic, and has published a graphic biography of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, that explores the life and iconic image of the revolutionary leader.

A tribute to Spain Rodriguez in this exhibition showcases underground comics, graphic novels, serial cartoons and fotonovelas that display both formal and conceptual resonances and compare these visual narratives with a focus on Rodriguez’s groundbreaking work.

Detail from CHE: a graphic biography, pp. 98, edited by Paul Buhle, published by Verso, London/New York, 2008

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GRANT FUNDERS

CURRENT BUSINESS SPONSORS

McCune Charitable Foundation The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts National Endowment for the Arts The FUNd at Albuquerque Community Foundation Bernalillo County City of Albuquerque City Council Cultural Services Department Urban Enhancement Trust Fund New Mexico Arts, a Division of the Office of Cultural Affairs, with the National Endowment for the Arts & the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA) New Mexico Council on Photography New Mexico Humanities Council New Mexico Tourism Department Albert I. Pierce Foundation University of New Mexico College of Fine Arts Provost Office Regents Endowment

Bank of Albuquerque Hotel Andaluz Goodman Realty Group New Mexico Bank & Trust New Mexico Business Weekly Technology Ventures Corporation

City of Albuquerque Richard J. Berry, Mayor David Campbell, Chief Administrative Officer

ABQ Convention & Visitors Bureau The Albuquerque Museum Al’s Big Dipper Bella Roma B&B Michael Berman Betty’s Bath & Day Spa Chaz Bojórquez Bon Won Frames Cheba Hut Cocina Azúl Neal Copperman Cuisine del Corazón, Chef Billy Brown Desert Dog Technology, Inc. Don Mickey Designs Downtown Action Team The Flower Shop at Nob Hill Hotel Blue Historic District Improvement Co. KUNM Radio 89.9 FM Francesca Searer Trent Simpler Starline Printing Stubblefield Screenprint Co. Untitled Fine Arts Services Williams College Museum of Art

City Council Don Harris, President, District 9 Rey Garduño, Vice-President, District 6 Ken Sanchez, District 1 Debbie O’Malley, District 2 Isaac Benton, District 3 Brad Winter, District 4 Dan Lewis, District 5 Michael D. Cook, District 7 Trudy Jones, District 8

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

516 ARTS is an independent, nonprofit arts venue offering programs that inspire curiosity, dialogue, risk-taking and creative experimentation, showcasing a mix of established, emerging, local, national and international artists from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Our mission is to forge connections between art and audiences, and our vision is to be an active partner in developing the cultural landscape of Albuquerque and New Mexico. Our values are inquiry, diversity, collaboration and accessibility.

DONOR & PATRON CONTRIBUTORS Frieda Arth Norty & Summers Kalishman John & Jamie Lewinger New Mexico Orthopaedics Rick Rennie & Sandy Hill Arturo Sandoval, in memory of Anna Kavanaugh Sandoval Jim & Sarah Scott Dr. Mark Unverzagt & Laura Fashing David Vogel & Marietta Patricia Leis Dr. Marta Weber Clint Wells SPECIAL THANKS

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

STAFF & CONSULTANTS

Arturo Sandoval, Chair Suzanne Sbarge, President/Founder Kathryn Kaminsky, Vice President Joni Thompson, Treasurer/Secretary Dr. Marta Weber, Fundraising Chair David Vogel

Suzanne Sbarge, Executive Director Rhiannon Mercer, Assistant Director Teresa Buscemi, Program Coordinator Claude Smith, Education Coordinator Benjamin Tobias, Intern Lisa Gill, Literary Arts Coordinator Jane Crayton, ISEAyouth Coordinator Jane Kennedy, Development Associate Janice Fowler, Bookkeeper Matthew Taylor, bulletproofstudios.com Website Consultant Melody Mock, Website Consultant

ADVISORY BOARD Frieda Arth Hakim Bellamy Sherri Brueggemann Christopher Burmeister Andrew Connors Miguel Gandert Idris Goodwin Norty Kalishman Arif Khan John Lewinger, Founding Chair Wendy Lewis Danny Lopez Christopher Mead Elsa Menéndez Melody Mock Henry Rael Mary Anne Redding Augustine Romero Nancy Salem Rob Strell Clint Wells

PROJECT ASSISTANTS Elena Aviles Joseph Baca Julia Blitch Hilary Ellenshaw Michael Gallagher David Hartshorne Ben Johnsen Neilie Johnson Arnaldo Morales Luanne Redeye Jocelyn Salaz Benjamin Tobias Cheryl (Tina) Vasquez

© 2011, 516 ARTS Published by 516 ARTS, 516 Central Avenue SW, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87102 tel. 505-242-1445, www.516arts.org Design by Suzanne Sbarge. Printed by Don Mickey Designs.

COVER: Drowned in a Glass of Water (detail), mixed media installation, commissioned by the Williams College Museum of Art, curated by Cynthia Way

Exhibition catalog generously printed

by Starline Printing

www.starlineprinting.com