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Volver: Mexican Folk Art into PlayPost an Event »

Museum of Craft and Folk Art

September 24 - January 17, 2011

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51 Yerba Buena Lane San Francisco, CA 94103
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Volver: Mexican Folk Art into Play Favianna Rodriguez
Adrian Esparza, Máximo González, Armando Miguelez, Eduardo Sarabia, and Favianna Rodriguez To celebrate Mexico’s Bicentennial Anniversary of Independence (September 16, 1810) and the Centennial of the Revolution (November 20, 1910), the Museum of Craft and Folk Art presents Volver: Mexican Folk Art into Play. This exhibition looks to traditional crafts from Mexico and focuses on contemporary works that imbue materials and processes of popular folk art with conceptual potency. The artists of Volver engage in the tradition of folk art while delving into its history and articulating a variety of unsettling realities through a contemporary optic. At a moment in time when Mexico is experiencing a prolonged increase of violence and the US is planning a larger border barrier as well as debating excessive immigration laws, the artists of Volver take a light-hearted, yet critical approach to serious issues. The artists introduce a sense of play as they update, reform, and activate these original source traditions. Artist Adrian Esparza (El Paso, Texas) exhibits the ubiquitous Zarape/blanket, and unravels it, creating a wall sculpture reminiscent of a minimalist painting. The work is about transformation—about a history that is used in order to construct a new form; Máximo González (Mexico City, Mexico), weaves out-of-circulation Mexican currency into striking wall hangings. By weaving currency using traditional weaving techniques, Gonzalez challenges how we value craft, traditions, and art; Armando Miguelez (San Francisco, California), looks to the popular art of piñata-making but his piñatas are socially engaged—they come in the shape of immigration blimps (TARS-Tethered Aerostat Radar Site) that monitor the US border; and, Eduardo Sarabia (Guadalajara, Mexico), appropriates ceramic art techniques to produce hundreds of ceramic plates infused with the artist’s signature iconography—automatic weapons, marijuana leaves, roosters, goats, women—that relate to the symbols and language of black market and illegal cross-border commerce. Celebrated printmaker and digital artist Favianna Rodriguez (Oakland, California) designed the graphics for the exhibition. Her work imitates traditional geometric and graphic styles of Incan and Mayan cultures, while adding reference to contemporary concerns and political and street art graphics. A special component of the exhibition is the commission of a new work by Armando Miguelez that addresses the collection of folk art housed at the Mexican Museum. In the Mexican Museum collection Miguelez discovered intriguing vessels intended for practical use in food serving and ritual, which made him question emptiness in form and original content. Abstracted from their intended purpose, can these objects tell the whole story about a culture? What stories are they in fact capable of telling? The new work, titled Its Not Me, Its You, addresses the void often created in object-based cultural collections: the negative space between the object and its culture. The artists of Volver draw the viewer in through formal considerations as they engage in both traditional and contemporary practices. The works create a compelling and playful dialogue between the importance of tradition and cultural complexities in the contemporary world—celebrating both the past and the present.