Barbara Carrasco was starving. She had just dropped off her husband, the artist Harry Gamboa Jr., at LAX and driven cross-town to meet me at their old hangout, Phillipe’s. As we sat down with French dip sandwiches and talked about her life and work I realized that underneath the easy laugh and unpretentious manner there was an incredible strength that had allowed her to travel from the projects of Mar Vista, to the halls of UCLA, to battle the sexism and racism from both the Anglo and Chicano communities, to work with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, to get her MFA at Cal Arts and to beat cancer. [Read more…]
The Cross-Bordered DeLIMITations Bridges An Era’s Divide
at Museo De La Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner“Delimitation means the act or process of fixing limits or boundaries of territorial constituencies in a country or province having a legislative body”
A timely and compelling installation at Museo De La Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico, entitled DeLIMITations by Mexican artist Marcus Ramirez ERRE and American artist David Taylor, examines and documents through stills, a documentary film, large-scale graphics, a solid-steel obelisk and historical research presented as wall text, the original border between the United States and Mexico as determined by the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1821. Their historical, political and cultural piece sets about to establish a border that was never physically marked by placing 47 steel obelisks along the 2400 mile border that never was. The treaty was rescinded 27 years later, after the Mexican-American War of 1846-8, when Mexico ceded 55% of its land to the United States in a land grab disguised as a war. Ulysses S. Grant was then a young lieutenant who fought in the war, and later admitted (and is quoted here in the exhibition) “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war…I thought so at the time…only I had not the moral courage to resign.” [Read more…]
New Work From Erin Currier
American Women (dismantling the border) II
American Women (dismantling the border) II (48″x60″) depicts the U.S. Mexico wall being dismantled by American Indigenous women (Comanche, Navajo, on the U.S. side; Aztec, Miztec, Mayan, on the Mexican side). Most borders which define Nation States — topics of such heated debate — were only recently built, created by Colonial conquest, and are false constructs: hastily drawn lines etching across and carving up lands inhabited for millennia by Indigenous peoples. Thus, it is the right of the Indigenous to dismantle the oppressive walls and artificial distinctions of the world: walls that slice through the heart of communities and ecosystems, the only function of which is fear based exclusion. [Read more…]