From Xico

Informing People of Stuff They Ought to Know -- Public Service Announcements

Last Wednesday we went to the Xico city hall to pay our predial, or property tax for this year.  It wasn't quite the last minute, but almost. The city hall is an old stone building.  The original facade has recently been uncovered and it is now fashionably old colonial looking.  I will try to remember to post some pictures.  This time I am posting photos of two public service  posters distributed by the Comisión Nacional de las Derechas Humanas, a federal organization.  Click on them to make them big enough to read.   The first one, translated into English, says:

"Do you know what you are buying? Some products which you buy have been made by people captured for the purpose of exploiting them in forced work or services. Don't be an accomplice.  Behind what you buy there could be a story you don't want to be a part of."

 

 

 

 

 

This second image which is definitely eye-catching says, "Seduction is one of the means most used by human traffickers to capture women for the purpose of sexual exploitation.  Take care! Look past appearances.  Behind what you think you want may be a story you don't want to be a part of." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This final notice, stuck on the wall with masking tape, is anything but arty.  But it is a nice notice.  It advertises on behalf of the State of Veracruz that you can get free civil marriage for a period of time: "The general public is invited to participate in the free matrimony campaign inspired by The Day of Love and Friendship [Valentine's Day here].  Information in the office of the Civil Register from 9am to 3pm.Requirements: Birth certificate, electior credential, CURP, kids' birth certificates."

Here in Veracruz and maybe all México, the civil marriage by a civil officer is required for a legal marriage, followed by a church marriage.  For poor people, both can be too costly to afford.  Many people just move in together and consider themselves married for this reason.  After eight years, it is considered a legal marriage. Even before, both partners are entitled to some right of marriage. But this gesture will certainly be welcomed by some couples.  You can see that after a few years, they may very well have kids.

 

Here we often see public service notices addressing all kinds of issues like these.  There are many public health messages on safe sex, taking care of yourself in pregnancy, how to avoid illness, etc.  They tend to be quite direct.  Also, I am also struck by how art is used, how arty, if you will, the illustrations are. I thought you might enjoy this glimpse into everydayness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Umm...Better late than never?

It sounds strange to say it, but Day of the Dead is a holiday that is really fun.  This is due in part today to the omnipresence of Catrinas, often life-sized dolls created by all kinds of people for display. The original Katrina was Jose Guadalupe Posada´s gift to Mexico. Posada (1852-1913) was a prolific cartoonist and illustrator who used
not just Catrina but skulls and skeletons of all sots and just about everything else  in his political cartoons.  Later nineteenth century Mexico, by the way, was home to quite a number of political cartoonists. Posada himself was a primary influence on Diego Rivera who hung around outside his studio in Mexico City to watch him work. Rivera included Catarina in his famous mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central.  

 In this section, you can see Diego, portraying himself as a boy, holding hands with Catrina and standing in front of Frida Kahlo.As were many of Posada´s cartoons, this mural is satirical, a lightish portrayal of social classes in Mexico.

Below are some Catrinas we snapped fotos of in Coatepec.

A voluptuous (in a manner of speaking) woman in  an athletic costume with pink sneakers.  I really like the sneakers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Catrina in a  sparkly dress in a clothing letter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Catrina in an antique store, with a tricycle for some reason.

 

 A Catrina up on the 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

roof

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Catrina in a coffee shop.

 

 

 

 

 

Cut-outs in tissue paper hang all over, too:

Glorious Mexico, Tragic Mexico

 

Mexico has had a rough autumn, to put it mildly.  We are accustomed here in Xico to a continuous but for the most part fairly quiet drum beat of anxiety- and sadness-producing news, but so far we live our lives more or less peacefully in the midst of our beautiful, verdant neighborhood. But this fall, the disappearance of the 43 normalistas or students training to be teachers has touched everyone.  The most detailed story I’ve seen in English of the disappearance and following events is here: https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-01-04/mexico-the-disappeared-en . It is also available in Spanish.  Just change the final en to sp.  

A well-known contemporary Mexican author, Guadalupe Loaeza wrote a very moving piece in La Reforma about a surprising and dramatic demonstration of support at the National Theater for the fallen students.   She started it in a way which will stir memories at least among some New York (and Boston) women:

 As I do every year, last Sunday I took my grandchildren to see “The Nutcracker” at the National Theater. Once seated, I gave myself a task: to watch all the people filled with holiday cheer as they entered the theater to admire the last performance of Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet, the music of which is so familiar to us that even the most ignorant can recall a fragment. Most of the attendees were children and adolescents, bundled up and accompanied by their families. The atmosphere inside the enormous auditorium, with space for 10,000 people, was festive and Christmassy.

She continued,

For my part, I was a deeply gratified grandmother surrounded by my six grandchildren, two of my sons, my daughter-in-law and Paloma Figueroa, the young professional dancer. With that same festive mindset, I watched young grandmothers wearing 100 percent wool coats with furs and carrying Coach or Marc Jacob purses. Many greeted and waved to each other from afar. The show was only minutes away from beginning.

Suddenly, the lights went down and at the stage’s illuminated center appeared a group of young people holding two banners, one with the hashtag #Yamecansé [Enough, I'm tired]** written on it and on the other could be read the words, “Stop impunity.” Daniel Castillo, in evening wear, spoke on behalf of his fellow members of the National Dance Company:

"Mexico is mourning the unsustainable and heartbreaking impunity that has become a daily story and that violates our citizenry."

With perfect diction, his words echoed all across the auditorium.

You can (and should) read the rest of it here .

The tragedy has threaded its way through all classes here, all regions.  

The National Theater where Señora Loaeza and her grandkids saw The Nutcracker  shows the extravagant side of Mexico.  Housed in the Palacio de las Bellas Artes, it is home to the Mexican national theater company and I think the Ballet Folklorico.  It hosts all kinds of performances and performance groups.

                                      Auditorium of the National Theater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The stage is hidden by the luminous curtain, the work of the Tiffany Glass Studios of Long Island, New York.  Louis C. Tiffany oversaw its creation from the beginning and supervised twenty mosaic workers for fifteen months. The workers came to Mexico to steep themselves in the setting.The curtain is a mosaic weighing 27 tons with a surface of 2500 square feet.  It apparently takes 7 seconds to open. I don't believe there is anything like it elsewhere in the world. I tried to insert an old black and white picture of the curtain in which you can see very clearly the scene of Popocateptl and Ixtaccihuatl, but I couldn't transfer it into a form acceptable to Typepad.  These two volcanoes are, according to legend, the final resting place of two star-crossed lovers.  You can read about the legend, the mosaic, and the Palacio de las Bellas Artes in a charming booklet written by someone in the Tiffany Studio about the time of the making of the curtain here.

The Palacio itself is a wedding cake of a building, art nouveau on the outside and art deco on the inside. Among the works of art you can find murals by Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros and others as well as an array of sculptures by European as well as Mexican sculptors.  Indigenous imagery mixes with European.

Construction started just after the birth of the twentieth century by command of Porfirio Diaz who wanted opulent buildings for the 100th anniversary of Mexican independence. He laid the first stone in 1904. The Palacio was supposed to be ready by 1910 in time for the celebration of Mexico's independence, but not just geological problems with the subsurface, its history did as well. 1910 marked the start of the Mexican Revolution.  The building was not completed until 1934 when the Mexican architect Federico Mariscal took over supervising its construction.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art has extensive online resources.  I was amazed and really excited to find out about them.  Just start with the link to the Tiffany Studio booklet and go grom there..

Well, I took a detour. Not really.  It circles back to Guadalupe Loaeza and her grandchildren and the tribute to the 43 normalistas and beyond.

And as if in sympathy with the sorrows of the country, Popocatepetl has roused himself from sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jose Guadalupe Posada, artist and printmaker extraordinaire

 

November 2  was the official Day of the Dead here in Mexico.  For at least a week beforehand, people put up their altars and set out life-size Catrinas decked in fancy dress clothes.  There have been processions, too.  In our colonia also for celebrating a saint or two.  

La Calavera Catrina was a creation of Jose Guadalupe Posada, a printmaker who used her to satirize classist living in Mexico:  the rich clothes hang on the skeleton who spent her money on them and didn't have enough for food. Calavera actually means skull, but has come to mean the whole Day of the Dead ummm woman.  Posada himself was famous as a satirist of Mexican life as well as an illustrator and a major influence on the muralist Diego Rivera. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth in Mexico there was in fact what I might call a movement of satirists and cartoonists who made fun of the government and society and everything related to them.  They were skillful artists, these cartoonists.  The tradition continues today, though I think in somewhat muted form.

Posada was not just a political cartoonist, however.  He made thousands and thousands of prints about all kinds of Mexican subjects.  He was enormously skillful.  He used a number of methods to make his prints including lithography, and to speed up his work, he developed a process of using a special ink directly on a metal plate.  His first pictures appeared when he was still a teenager in a journal in Aguascalientes, his hometown, called El jicote.

A self portrait.

And below a sampling of his work.

 

Posada and the catrina.

 

Revolución (Mexican, of course)

 

[I don't know the title of this one]

I don't know whether this was a cover of a book or what, but it sure wasn't pro-Spanish.

 

Some thoughts on this print can be found at this link.  If you are interested in Posada, this is a site worth visiting.

 

I'll conclude with this, the central panel of Diego Rivera's mural, Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda (Park).  Catarina has one arm through Posada's arm and with her right hand, she is holding the child Diego's hand.  Behind Diegoyou can see Frida Kahlo.  

There are hundreds and hundreds of images of Posada's creations on Google.  Because he worked mostly in black and white, the computer screen is okay for looking at his pictures.

Detroit in the News Again and I Haven't Stopped Learning about Diego Rivera

 

Yesterday The NY Times had an impressive mosaic of houses in foreclosure or close to it in Detroit.  It was impressive because of the numbers and because of the stories behind some of them.  There have been other stories, too, not receiving such flashy placement and graphics including one I missed about some kind of commemorative of the Rivera murals in the Detroit Institute of Art.  All these months I have been reading about Rivera, the Fords, Detroit, Mexico City, art and revolutions of different sorts. I figure I'd better put fingers to keyboard and get started with something!  It´s on its way.  As they say here, proximo.

A Few Photos of Photos at Caftan Rojo

The final curtain has fallen.  Susan Trigg and Jim's photo exposition is over.  I never quite managed to get there at the same time as my camera did (I don't have a smartphone) and so never got to take orderly pictures.  But below are a few of Jim's shots seen through my camera as we were taking everything down, and also a few shots of Caftán Rojo, the exhibition space/art school where the show was held.  Any fuzziness in the shots is my fault.  Jim's photos were beautiful and sharp.  The woman who printed them, Mariana del Campo, gave them rich, velvety color.  Remember, if you click on them, you can get bigger (but not clearer) images.

 

 

A grasshopper hugging a blade of grass.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A mostly blue moth

 

 

 

 

 

A Giant Beetle

 

 

 

A ladybug

 

 

 

 

 

I hope I am not doing too much of an injustice to this photo by putting up my inadequate version.  It was taken at the very top of Cofre de Perote with fog swirling around.  The rails lead back to the ladder on which you go down the rocky outcropping which crowns the mountain.

 

 

 

 

 

Baby hummingbirds in their nest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Covered patio at Caftán Rojo.  Art students hang out during their break.  One girl is an incredibly hoola-hooper.  She seems to practice for hours.

 

 

 

 

 

The courtyard at Caftán Rojo.

Jim and Susan worked hard putting the exhibit together and hanging it. And they took it down so fast!

 

Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and Henry Ford (1863-1947)

In 1931, Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, accepted a commission to make frescoes for the Detroit Institute of Art.  It seems at first glance to have been an unlikely commission. He was a communist, and the funding for this project was provided by the Ford motor company, Capitalist, big C. 

We were walking down Madison Avenue in NYC, my mom and I, looking in art gallery windows here and there. I was maybe twelve. It would have been the mid-1950. In one window, there was a detail print of a mural. I can’t remember whether it was from a work by Larry Rivers or Diego Rivera. My mother was intensely interested in modern art. She thought I should be interested in it, too.  She had had just enough luck in her efforts to fan my interest  to launch into a lesson on murals. My mother wasn’t impressed with Rivers’ one mural effort by that time, George Washington Crossing the Delaware. She said she did rather enjoy Rivera's murals.  I don't remember why because she was critical of their conscious appeal to “popular sensibilities" and thought they were too political. In her mind, art should be neither popular or political, a view held by many Americans who wanted to cast their lots with intellectuals.  This shunning of the popular and the political in art has left a legacy that is still with us, I would say unfortunately.

So Rivera's mural in Rockefeller Center fit into this lesson.  In 1933 when Rivera hadn't quite finished it, Nelson Rockefeller, the benefactor of the mural, got wind of the fact that Lenin had a prominent place in it and ordered work stopped and essentially fired Rivera.  The mural sat behind cloth sheets for awhile, and some seven months later, Rockefeller ordered it destroyed.  And it was.

 My mother thought it was an example of the problems of mixing art and politics. She managed to plant a seed of interest in my mind with this story, but not because I agreed with her.  politics in art did interest me much more than what seemed to me the hyper-intellectualism of art critics and my mother.

The seed lay almost dormant for years and years although I recognized some of his work decorating posters and doctors offices and the like. Even after my then- husband and I visited Rivera's hometown of Guanajuato in the 1990s visit, he remained no more than a small part of the clutter in my brain.

My interest in Rivera burst into full bloom quite unexpectedly. I was reading the NY Times online one morning not long ago a (it becomes a way to avoid more serious projects)  and came upon a story about Detroit's bankruptcy which  told of the possibility that the bankruptcy might make it necessary for the Detroit Art Institute to sell its collection to pay city workers’ pensions. Among the top four or five works most likely to bring in large sums was Rivera’s mural called Detroit Industry.  Huh?  Who knew he’d done a mural in Detroit of all places?  I poked around a little and found a number of sites with photos of the mural.  They were incredible. For the first time in my life I wanted to go to Detroit, if only to see this mural.

I started to read, first about Rivera, then about Detroit at the time of the creation of the mural, then about Mexico at that time and earlier, and about Henry and Edsel Ford and about actual conditions at Ford plants, about the effects of the Depression, about other actors in the story of the Detroit murals: Henry and Edsel Ford, Valentiner, Frida Kahlo, and other Mexican muralists and on and on. How could I stop? It’s a growing tapestry I'm not ready to disentangle myself from.

At first,  when I thought of Rivera, I imagines him  as short, fat, and homely. I knew considerably more about Frida Kahlo, as many USAers do.  I wasn’t alone wondering how Kahlo could find Rivera attractive, which indeed she did.

 

I fit what I saw into  these preconceptions.You can see both  Rivera and Kahlo in this mural Diego painted called ”Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park”.

I didn’t realize that Diego had pictured himself as a boy in this central panel (he is standing in front of Kahlo and next to a calavera). I know, I know.  How many men would wear striped socks? Preconceived notions, etc.

As I started rummaging through material I found that Rivera was indeed an attractive man for all that people (including him) described him as having odd and ugly-sounding features.  But he wasn't short at all.  In fact, he was quite tall, over six feet. And though at his heaviest, he was just plain fat, his height balanced his weight somewhat so that in no way did he appear like the very round dwarf  I'd imagined.

In the photo at left, you can get some idea of his size. In the next posts on Rivera, I’ll show you some photos and paintings of Diego and some quotes from him and others so you can perhaps build up an idea of what he was like.

 

 

Mexico and Detroit, Diego Rivera and the Fords

In an effort to deal with bankruptcy, it had been proposed that Detroit sell its fabulous art collection to meet city pension fund obligations of roughly 800 million dollars.  I wrote about this here  and provided an update link here. More recently, at the end of January, private funds and government sources had come up with pledges that come close to the 800 million dollars needed for the pension fund so that it would not be necessary to sell the art.  A BBC article provides vivid reminder of just what not having a pension fund would mean.  This would be a cruel bind, a killing blow to the city’s retired workers. It would be hard to justify keeping the art if it turned retired city workers into paupers.  

Part of the plan would turn the museum over to a private not-for-proft organization instead of continuing as city property, thus, hopefully, saving it from being a pawn in future municipal budget difficulties. None of this is certain yet.  But it is a promising start.  If it succeeds, I hope the Institute will expand its reach into Detroit communities, so that it becomes a living presence which all kinds of citizens can be part of. 

I knew nothing about the Institute until I realized that among its most valuable treasures was a huge mural created by Diego Rivera the famous Mexican muralist, called Detroit Industry.  Far from being hoity toity art, this mural is a passionate and beautiful portrayal of working Detroit. I haven’t seen the original, but even online it is impossible that it not draw you in.

Today’s economic situation in Detroit is not altogether different from what it was during The Great Depression when Diego Rivera created the mural.  And the mural reveals roots of today’s crisis.  In some subsequent posts, I’ll talk about this as well as about Mexican connections and about how art and our lives really do go together.       

   

 

Detroit's Art Collection

An update in the Guardian (UK) here.

Diego Rivera's Murals in Detroit and New York City and Detroit's Bankruptcy

 

Detroit, which I'm sure most of you know, is facing bankruptcy, is having the great collection of art housed in the Detroit Institute of Art evaluated by Christies for possible sale to pay off debts. There's an article in the Art and Design section of the New York Times  about this. 

In the NY Times, Diego Rivera's name falls at the end of a very short list of great painters: Bruegel and Van Gogh and Diego Rivera.  There are many more who could be included.

Today in La Jornada, you can find an article by Mexico's David Brooks about the Rivera piece, in fact a large mural painted in1932-1933 before the more-famous Rivera mural (famous because of its destruction) in Rockefeller Center. This PBS piece is a nice summary of that brouhaha.

The mural in Detroit is two stories high and called "Detroit's Industry".  Not only does it portray workers and steel and machinery, it has tender side pieces as you can see here.  Here is a link to a virtual tour of the mural.

As the mural in Rockefeller Center did a couple of years later, the one in Detroit provoked controversy. In Detroit it was religious as well as social and political. After all, Rivera was an avowed communist. Among other accusations, it was said the piece "fomented ´class warfare', that it made fun of Jesus, that it promoted racial equality and that it was Marxist propaganda."  The principle daily newspaper of the time, The Detroit News, wanted it destroyed. Thankfully, that didn't happen.

Things have changed in Detroit.  Today the majority of its citizens want the art kept.  The state´s attorney general has said that it is a charitable trust and as such can't be sold to pay off the debts of the city.  But it's still notclear that it will be preserved for the city.  It is possible that the art will be put in opposition to the city workers' pensions: keep the art or pay the retired workers.

Brooks points to the dedication at the entrance of the DIA:  Dedicated to the people of Detroit for the knowledge and enjoyment of art."  That so many people in Detroit want the art to stay in the face of the obvious suffering of the city is remarkable.  This is a debate worth having. Art held in the name of the people, for the people: does it help when people are poor? 

 

ro

Related articles

Clash of ideologies: Diego Rivera's art on display in DC

Non-Western via the Mexican Muralism

'American nightmare' in Detroit

Detroit, Minneapolis, and Diego Rivera's prophecy