Oaxacan Street Art

As always, lots of street art worth recording in Oaxaca.  Sometimes it's a fine line between wall art and a business graphic - Click here for my updated Street Art Album.

A Book of Hearts

 Giving it a whirl...

 

 Trying our hand at printmaking.  

 

Heart stamps that we printed and shared and pasted into an accordion book.

Chapulines anyone

Lithograph someone was working on at the San Pablo Cultural Center.

The grasshopper - Oaxaca's totem animal!

Art Making in Oaxaca

We spent a morning gathering plants from the garden and pressing them into plasticene and making prints.....it was a delicate process....loved it.

(photo courtesy the lovely Brooke Kyle Lambard)

Only in Mexico

 Jill and I were lucky enough to have a morning making linoleum block prints with the help of two talented women working at San Pablo Cultural Center.  Among other things, we talked with our Mexican cohort about dialectic as a superior tool for teaching.  Not kidding, her words, not mine.  All the while we're carving our blocks.

Here's Jill, brayer in hand,  getting ready to ink up her block.  And what a beautiful print it is.

And here's something fun Jill found out on our little art outing.  She was needing to buy some newsprint for the class tour but she didn't know the word for newsprint in Spanish.  Turns out, there's a particularly Mexican expression for newsprint and they call it "papel de la revolucion" or paper from the revolucion because newsprint was so widely used to disseminate info about the goings on during the civil war of 1910-1920.

How cool is that?

Making art and learning a new word plus some history all  at the same time!

Hello Oaxaca

 We are just back a week now from our Amazing Art Adventure.  So busy during the trip, not to mention the fortuitous fact that my computer went on the blink and I had to wait a week for the new keyboard to come from Mexico City so I was not so plugged in and pleasantly so.

 

So only now am I sharing some highlights from the recent trip. And in the , "You never know what you might find in Oaxaca" category, the lovely San Pablo Cultural Center, was presenting a show all about printmaking and the book arts.  We could not have planned it any better.

What we'll be doing in 2014

 

Revolutionary at work!

  Young Oaxacan printmaker Cesar Chavez has been kind enough to invite us to visit his printmaking collective in Oaxaca.

Yes please! 

Oaxacan artist Cesar Chavez

Last year, during the tour, as we were wandering back from Humberto Bautista's studio on Porfirio Diaz, Jill stumbled upon the art collective Espacio Zapata and we've wanted to know more ever since.  Well in a small world story that is way too long to go into here, it just so happened that one of the members of the collective, Cesar Chavez was going to be in Eugene speaking at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.  The musuem director had recently gone down to Oaxaca and purchased ten prints which were on display too. Can we say kismet and manna from heaven in the same breath?   He gave a great talk on working in a collective and the political art scene in Oaxaca.   And the gods were smiling upon us, because as it turns out, we got to spend the afternoon with Cesar and take him around to show him the "art scene" in Eugene.  Pic is of Cesar above wearing one of his t-shirts.  We went to an art supply store, a frame shop, an upscale gallery, and visited the studio of Shanna Trumbly. I hope he had as much fun as we did. And we hope to visit with him again, this time in Oaxaca. The ASARO show is still up in Eugene through most of April.

Jose Posada -

I am teaching myself Mexican art history.  And it is fascinating and rich and deep and complex - hm...kind of like Mexico.  And so different from our own. Murals and printmaking seem to be the dominant mediums, the places where Mexican art really distinguishes itself.   Both mediums  have a kind of populist leaning which also seems to be part of the Mexican psyche. Loving learning about Jose Posada.  He was a political cartoonist  for newspapers  and  probably best remembered  for giving us La Caterina - the skeleton dressed up with a fancy hat, pearls, and a feather boa, now a ubiquitous image in the Mexican lexicon.  But he was also a prolific children's book illustrator along with Manuel Manilla.  Here's a link for the book I'm presently devouring which is all about the fairy tale illustrations they did.   Makes me want to do printmaking.