I was in Santa Fe last week and I fully intended to write a review of the Georgia O’Keefe museum but honestly, you can just Google her and see all the reviews and a gazillion images of her work. Instead, let me tell you about the gem of a museum that is the Museum of International Folk Art.
Humans love making things: It doesn’t matter where you go in the world, you will find carefully crafted objects created by human hands. Judging from my visit to the Museum of International Folk Art, humans love to make tiny versions of themselves and place them in miniature worlds, telling the story of their lives and the lives of the people around them. Humans also love to invent fantastical stories and create characters to inhabit those stories, as played out in the work of the cartonería artists in the current display of Mexican paper mâché objects.
We are probably all familiar with Mexican piñatas, Day of the Dead skeletons, and Milagros (religious charms) but you may not be aware of the work of contemporary Mexican artists working to advance the cartonería tradition and make it appealing to current collectors. One such artist, Pedro Linares (1906-1992) invented a form of fantastical creature called an ‘Alebrije’, several of which are on display in the current exhibition. If you watched the 2017 Disney Pixar animated film “Coco”, you will have seen these Alebrije creatures feature prominently in all their brightly-colored glory.
A sense of fun, color, imagination, and adventure - those are the elements I saw in all of the cartonería work. It’s playful, full of energy and joy. I wanted to pick up the little characters, make up squeaky voices and play with them like a toddler.
And of course, Frida Kahlo is there too:
One of the exhibition discussion points that impacted me, and something that was echoed in the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts which I also visited, is how indigenous arts/crafts are not allowed to develop, contemporize, or politicize because of colonialism, capitalism and the expectations of white ethno-tourists. The tourists that visit Santa Fe expect a certain type of art and craft. Tourists want to see what they, as white people, believe is Native Art or Mexican Craft and this is exceptionally problematic. Chicano artist, Luis Tapia, exhibited regularly at the famous annual Spanish Market in Santa Fe, a market that was started and supported by Anglo patrons. The year he submitted work painted with bright acrylics, using contemporary political themes, he was told by Spanish Market to use natural dyes for a “softer” color and that he was “abandoning…tradition.” WTF! White folks telling a man with Mexican heritage that he is not allowed to move forward his own tradition! You see this everywhere in Santa Fe however: “Assholes in Turquoise” as New Mexican-born Anna Merlan states in her inciteful article, “Manifest Destiny-Lite With Souvenirs: Why Assholes in Turquoise Are Flooding the Southwest.”
Santa Fe is held in a time warp, and that’s deliberate. Preventing peoples from moving their own cultures forward is an act of erasure - the same shit colonists have been doing for generations.
Moving on. Walk through to the permanent exhibition space and you will find objects equally as captivating as the cartonería. I promise you will walk into the gallery and immediately feel like a child again: floor-to-ceiling displays of lovingly crafted, tiny people from around the world, living in tiny towns and houses. Enchanting! There are puppets, model trains, dolls and their fancy houses, fantastical creatures, ornate boxes, and alters full of characters. I was totally enthralled - literally the kid in the candy store! I came away with so many ideas for developing my portraiture work into 3D sculpture.
A teacher once told me that if you want to make good art, you have to see good art. I certainly saw some fantastic art at this museum. But more than that, I found a connection with artists and craftspeople across the world. I understood that my urge to create funny-looking portraits was not at all unusual (we’re never as different as we think we are), in fact, folks have been doing this since humans evolved on this planet. I left the Museum of International Folk Art feeling that I belonged to a huge tradition of artists wanting to create their own weird little worlds. I really felt the words that stand over the entrance to the museum:
The art of the craftsman is a bond between the peoples of the world.
I just wish it read “craftspeople” ;)
I also came out feeling I’m not odd enough lol, which is incredibly out of character because I’ve always felt like I don’t fit in and for much of my life that’s made me uncomfortable and embarrassed. But I was inspired by the odd curiosities in the museum, the imagination and skill of all of the craftspeople and the way they transformed very humble, accessible materials into objects that gave immense pleasure and enjoyment to visitors. I saw that the weirder the work, the more fun it was. As it happens, I also heard this message from British artist (and man who seems to be everywhere right now) Grayson Perry, just a week before I went to Santa Fe. I watched Grayson’s talk at the Royal Academy in which he urged artists to embrace “silliness” and to remember that “we’re just making stuff for rich people’s houses” so if we’re not having fun, what’s the point?
What’s the point, indeed?
Until next time.
JC
RESOURCES
Find details of La Cartonería Mexicana exhibition HERE
Read about the work of Pedro Linares HERE
LOVE this contemporary Mexican folk art: https://www.culturalart.org/josue-eleazar-castro/
This is the essay I used as reference regarding Pedro Linares and the Spanish Market - published in Journal of American Studies, 47 (2013) and can be found at jstor.org:
Reworking the Spanish Colonial Paradigm: Mestizaje and Spirituality in Contemporary New Mexican Art
STEPHANIE LEWTHWAITE
Highly recommend reading this article by Anna Merlan who talks about the history of New Mexico, the rise of “earth goddess hippie chic” in the 70’s and recent Native-led activist movements:
Manifest Destiny-Lite With Souvenirs: Why Assholes in Turquoise Are Flooding the Southwest
Thank you for highlighting such important work <3 I'm going to tour the links you posted this week(!)
I think that's why I have such an affinity for Mexican craftswork. In San Antonio (and many other places down South) there's lots of tin work (like sacred hearts, crosses, etc) made from recycled soda cans and also paper mache calaveras made from old magazines, etc. I've always admired how a lot of the craft/artworks are made from recycled items.