News (Noticias) Tagged ‘museum’

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Frida Kahlo exhibit is drawing a surge of Latino visitors, the result of outreach efforts and an innovative multimedia installation in English and Spanish. Kahlo, who is considered among the top five Mexican artists, is regarded as an image of pride and strength in the Latino community. The much-anticipated arrival of her art to San Francisco offers the museum – which has struggled to dispel its image as an exclusive and unapproachable institution – a critical opportunity to engage the Spanish-speaking community in a way that has never been done before.”*

LAXART is also pleased to present the premier of Miguel Angel Rios’ single-channel video entitled Crudo, 2008, selected by Gilbert Vicario, assistant curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Filmed both in New York and Mexico City, Crudo takes the viewer on a theatrical, percussive journey led by an unidentified white-suited man, wielding pieces of raw meat, who encounters a group of angry dogs. Mixing elements of dance from Veracruz, American tap, and Argentinean malambo sureño, the dancer’s percussive footwork drives the narrative tension of the scenario, counterbalanced by the tethered pieces of raw meat that swing around to provoke the angry animals – here hired to perform and engage with the dancer’s movements. Although strikingly different from Rios’ monochromatic and poetic videos of spinning tops, the characters in Crudo delineate order and disorder, control and unpredictability. Operating through metaphor, Crudo plays with a range of overwrought dichotomies particular to relationships of power, while questioning their logic and maintaining a narrative structure that remains opaque and without resolve. “*

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami, hopes that will change in a few years. She is the lead Republican sponsor of a bill recently passed by Congress that paves the way for the National Museum of the American Latino, the first of its kind.”*

By the way they present art, museums encourage us to engage objects one by one and to consider their individual characteristics. This usually produces a purely aesthetic response to a work’s formal qualities, without regard to its cultural ramifications.”*

We love things that don’t seem to make much sense at first glance. That’s why when Smithsonian magazine invited us to the Museum of the City to help celebrate Puerto Rican tourism, we knew we were in for something crazy. And the night did not disappoint…

The Museum sizzled with Puerto Rican spice July 9, thanks to a joint effort by Smithsonian magazine and the Puerto Rico Tourism Company.”*

A window washer dressed as Spiderman scales a building. A nanny clad as Cat Woman attends to children. A pizza delivery man wearing Superman garb rides a bike with pies in the basket.

The humorous photographs by Mexican artist Dulce Pinzon depict real immigrant workers in their everyday jobs. But the images also proclaim them as super heroes who work grueling hours to make a better life for their families.

The concept is linked to the immigrant experience in the United States and echoes throughout a new exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago.”*

El Museo del Barrio, New York’s premier Latino and Latin American cultural institution is pleased to present its groundbreaking exhibition, Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000. “Arte no es vida” surveys, for the first time ever, the vast array of performative actions created over the last half century by Latino artists in the United States and by artists working in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico, Central, and South America. “*

The Guggenheim Foundation’s proposal to build a museum in Guadalajara has failed because the foundation’s director Thomas Krens refused to scale down the project to fit Mexico’s art budgets, says Guadalajara businessman and art collector Jorge Vergara.

Mr Krens says that Mr Vergara has “absolutely nothing to do with our project in Guadalajara”. However as a powerful figure in the region—Mr Vergara owns the nutrition and cosmetics company Omnilife, four football clubs, and produces films—he is in a position to offer an insight into the processes that have resulted in the impasse.”*

Something about the man in the banana costume appealed to Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga. Maybe it was the sign he wore that read, “A banana from my country can travel easier than me.” Maybe it was the fruit-wearer’s free-spiritedness as he paraded in his peel through public places. Or maybe it was the Latino roots they shared.

So when Mr. Zúñiga, 37, a graphic artist from Brooklyn who also works with new media, was looking through the portfolios of immigrant artists who were seeking mentors, he picked Hatuey Ramos-Fermín, 30, a conceptual artist from the Bronx who has made videos of himself playing Benito Banana, a character he created to reflect on migration.

The two have met at least 10 times, attending lectures and museum openings and discussing their work and the common themes within, like immigration and globalization. They are part of a mentoring program run by the New York Foundation for the Arts that helps artists from abroad gain a toehold in the city’s diverse arts community”*

After more than seven years on the road, the Chicano art collection of Cheech Marin has finally come home. Its last stop is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the hometown venue that initially turned down a show that toured nationally and drew large crowds as “Chicano Visions.” A scaled-down version, titled “Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.,” opens Sunday at LACMA West. It features almost 50 paintings by some of the most influential members of the first generation of Chicano artists, including Patssi Valdez and three of the original members of Los Four — Frank Romero, Carlos Almaraz and Gilbert “Magu” Lujan — the collective featured in what is considered the country’s first major Chicano art exhibition, shown at LACMA in 1974.

For Marin, who championed Chicano art as his personal crusade, it’s not only a triumphal homecoming but a vindication for his campaign to place these artists squarely in the American mainstream. “With LACMA, it’s been love-hate toward the Chicano community since the beginning,” says Marin, best known as half of the comedy team of Cheech and Chong. “We’ve always been treated as the stepchildren. But I think that attitude is turning around now. . . . They can’t ignore us anymore.”"*

After years of operating out of a tiny downtown office and an exhaustive search for a permanent home, San Diego’s first-ever museum dedicated to the topic of immigration is opening its doors in Point Loma next weekend.

The New Americans Museum will be one of a handful of such places around the world, among them the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and others in Paris and in Melbourne, Australia.

But unlike those, the San Diego space formerly known as the New Americans Immigration Museum will open with the word “immigration” conspicuously absent. Board members voted to drop it before the venue opened.”*

TWO OF Cuba’s artistic exports — 20th century Modernist Wifredo Lam and emerging artist Carlos Luna — have landed side by side at Long Beach’s Museum of Latin American Art, in shows offering two variations on the theme of Cuban identity.

“The identity of being Cuban is not a one-way road,” says painter and sculptor Carlos Luna, via his wife and translator, Claudia. After all, modern Cuba is a conglomeration of Spanish, African and Indian elements, a mixed culture influenced by slave trading and the international sugar cane market. And though the works of Luna and the late Lam may differ in focus and style, Luna says, they both address “a very essential part of Cuban life, which stems from certain traditions and mixture.”"*

Several organizations, including multicultural PR and marketing firm Comunicad, are hoping to bring one more museum to Washington, DC, but this one will be dedicated to a growing segment of the US population: the National Museum of the American Latino.

Univision, National Council of La Raza, the US Hispanic Heritage Foundation, and individuals like civil rights leader Raul Yzaguirre, are working together as an advisory board for the Latino museum, which they hope will open in the next five to ten years.”*

The opening this week of a major San Francisco exhibit of the work of Frida Kahlo is a reminder that Mexican artists have found a home and inspiration in the Bay Area at least as far back as 1930, when Kahlo and her husband, Diego Rivera, spent a year working here.

At the same time, a crop of young Mexican artists is creating new work in the Bay Area, bringing a fresh lens to issues such as border walls and the fragility of urban landscapes. Many are forging a hybrid identity, moving back and forth between the United States and Mexico, and contributing to the cultures of both places.

“These are people living in a globalized world,” said René de Guzman, senior curator of art at the Oakland Museum of California, who mounted a show of Mexican art when he was curator of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the 1990s. “It enriches the cultural conversation that’s happening here.”"*

The art on the walls of Pilsen’s National Museum of Mexican Art glows in the low light of Christmas bulbs. The music is as mixed as the high schoolers having dance-offs to hip-hop and bachata.

A slow song comes on and two teenagers in the corner step gently together, one of them resting her chin on the other’s shoulder. Except at this prom, both dancers are girls.

Tania Unzueta, organizer of Queer Prom 2008, says some of the teens who identify with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community take their partners to their own schools’ proms in addition to this event, but others feel uncomfortable.”*

After a year delay, El Museo, on Fifth Ave. and 104th St., is scheduled to reopen in the fall of next year with a new glass facade, a redesigned courtyard, an expanded shop and a new cafe.

“What this renovation will bring is, first, the recognition that El Museo is now an open institution for all who enjoy our culture,” says Julián Zugazagoitia, the museum’s director.”*

The Museo Alameda is planning to launch a collection of three exhibitions highlighting the contributions Mexico has made to the art world over the last 500 years.

The museum will display collections of Mexican and Mexican-American arts from the 16th Century to modern times. “Mexico at the Museo” will open June 25 and run in phases through Feb. 22, 2009. This collection will be the first of its kind to be staged in San Antonio.”*

Artist Jesus Moroles will be in Laramie the week of May 27-30 to create a new, interactive work for “Sculpture: A Wyoming Invitational.” His work, “Granite Windows,” will be located on Prexy’s Pasture.

Made from a found steel tank, “Granite Windows” references the extractive industries of Wyoming. Eight feet in diameter and seven feet tall, the tank will be lined in polished granite and rotate on its base.

“In keeping with Moroles’ interest in interactive sculpture, visitors will be able to climb into the sculpture. It will rotate, changing the views from the interior and altering the perspective on the work from the distance,” says Susan Moldenhauer, director and curator of the University of Wyoming Art Museum.

For more than 30 years, Moroles has been creating large-scale public sculpture from granite. His studio in Rockport, Texas, is unequaled in the country for the making of large-scale sculptures.

In 1982, Moroles received the prestigious Awards in the Visual Arts Fellowship for which his works were included in a two-year traveling museum exhibition that originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Ill.

Noteworthy large-scale works by Moroles include his 22-foot tall sculpture fountain, titled “Floating Mesa Fountain” for the Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico, environmental installation of 45 sculptural elements and fountains for the Birmingham Botanical Gardens in Birmingham, Ala., made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts; and Lapstrake, a 64 ton, 22-foot tall sculpture for the E.F. Hutton, CBS Plaza in New York City, located across the street from the Museum of Modern Art.

Moroles’ inclusion in the landmark museum exhibition, “Contemporary Hispanic Art in the United States,” brought national attention to the artist. His largest single work is the 1991 site sculpture, the Houston Police Officers Memorial. Comprised of granite and an earthen stepped pyramid surrounded by four equal inverted stepped pyramids excavated from the ground, the sculpture spans 120 feet by 120 feet.

Moroles’ work has been included in more than 130 one-person exhibitions and more than 200 group exhibitions. He has lectured extensively about his work and the issue of public sculpture. His work has been the subject of numerous articles and reviews in ARTNEWS, Arts, Artforum, Artspace, Artweek, Newsweek, Southwest Art, Time, and The New York Times as well as several books such as “America Art Now,” and “Art in the Eighties.”

For “Sculpture: A Wyoming Invitational,” a second sculpture by Moroles, “Eclipse” is on view on the art museum’s terrace. Eclipse is a part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Works in “Sculpture: A Wyoming Invitational” will be placed or created on location between May and July.

“The exhibition offers extraordinary educational opportunities for students of all ages to learn about the artists, their creative process, and the behind-the-scenes view of just how these large-scale works are created and placed,” says Moldenhauer. The exhibition will be on view from Aug. 1 through July 31, 2009.

“Sculpture: A Wyoming Invitational” has been organized by the UW Art Museum, various agencies in the city of Laramie, and the Albany County Public Library. The exhibition is sponsored by an anonymous donor with additional support from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the Guthrie Family Foundation, FMC Corporation, First Interstate Bank of Laramie, First Interstate Bancsystems Foundation, the UW President’s Office, UW Office of Academic Affairs, UW Physical Plant, Laramie Park & Recreation, Laramie Economic Development Corporation, Main Street Laramie, Albany County Tourism Board, the Friends of Undine Park, Wyoming Public Radio and the National Advisory Board of the UW Art Museum.

The UW Art Museum is located in the Centennial Complex at 22nd and Willett Drive in Laramie. The museum and store are operating on special hours this summer and are open Monday through Friday 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission is free.

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I was perusing Hispanic Tips’ Blogante News when an article from La Prensa San Diego jumped out at me. The headline read: “Bush Signs Legislation for National Museum of the American Latino.”

My first reaction was a sense of pride and a desire to show all kinds of support. After all, shouldn’t there be a National Museum of the American Latino? Then, I started to hear voices. Not the multiple personality kind of voices, but rather the voices of non-profit board and committee members from several other Latino museum projects that either have opened or have tried to open throughout the U.S. over the past decade or two. “*

and this great paragraph that perfectly summarizes a discussion I had yesterday:

“Back to the voices. At first, they are full of pride and enthusiasm. Soon, however, these board, committee and staff members are angry and frustrated. They divide up into factions; factions that are an unfortunate, but perhaps unavoidable part of the U.S. Latino experience. One voice drowns out the other. “It’s too Mexican.” “It’s not Mexican enough.” “Too chilango.” “Not Mexican-American enough.” “Too Cuban.” “Why no Brazilians? Just because we speak Portuguese?” “Is the Chicano movement represented?” “Don’t use the word Chicano.” “Too much Spanish.” “Too much English.” “Spanglish? You can’t be serious!” “Too brown.” “Too white.” “What about black Hispanics. And Asian?” “Too upscale.” “Too downscale.” “Too foreign born.” “Too U.S. born.” “Spain doesn’t count.” “Spain is the motherland.” “It can’t be called Hispanic.” “It can’t be called Latino.” And on and on and on. Y más y más y más.

Internationally recognized molecular biologist and founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), Dr. Lydia Villa-Komaroff, has been named MOSI’s 2008 National Hispanic Scientist of the Year.

Mexican American, Dr. Lydia Villa-Komaroff is deeply committed to the recruitment and retention of minorities in science. As founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, Villa-Komaroff has served as both a board member and vice president of the organization. She makes frequent presentations to students of all ages and provides lab research opportunities for high school and undergraduate students. She currently serves as Chief Executive Officer of Cytonome, Inc., a company building the first optical cell sorter of human cells for therapeutic use. Villa-Komaroff was a key member of the research team that first demonstrated that bacterial cells could produce insulin, pioneering work that is widely cited in the book “Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Clone the Insulin Gene” by Stephen Hall.

During her 20 year research career, Villa-Komaroff has held positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, University of Massachusetts Medical School and Harvard Medical School. As a science administrator, she has served as Vice President for Research at Northwestern University in Illinois and the Vice President for Research and Chief Operating Officer of Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“With all of the hardships facing today’s youth, we are honored to celebrate the accomplishments of such a gifted Hispanic professional in science and education who is working to inspire successful career and life choices,” concluded Wit Ostrenko, MOSI President.

For eight years, MOSI (Museum of Science & Industry) has recognized nationally distinguished Hispanic science and engineering professionals to serve as role models and mentors for Tampa Bay’s Hispanic youth. Past honorees include a former U.S. Surgeon General, a Nobel Laureate of Chemistry, a NASA astronaut, a marine biologist, a Harvard professor of pathology and former chief of immunogenetics at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a seismologist and former director of the Carnegie Academy for Science Education (CASE), Washington, D.C., and most recently, an industrial engineer and the first Hispanic to serve as acting head of the Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF).

This year MOSI will present the National Hispanic Scientist of the Year Award to Dr. Lydia Villa-Komaroff during a gala award ceremony on Saturday, October 11, 2008.

The mission of the MOSI National Hispanic Scientist of the Year Award is to recognize outstanding Hispanic scientists who promote a greater public understanding of science and motivate Hispanic youths’ interest in science. Proceeds from the event help to fund scholarships for at-risk youth who participate in MOSI’s Youth Enriched by Science program.

The Youth Enriched by Science, “YES!” Team, is a career and educational enrichment program designed to help at-risk youth, between the ages 13 to 17, develop and progress in a supportive peer-group environment. Established in 1992, the focus of the program is to provide an opportunity for students to develop self-confidence, improve communication skills, build self-esteem and exhibit leadership skills. In addition, students are encouraged and motivated to pursue science both as a career and as an essential element of their total education. Mentors train students on science education, critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, and incorporating their ideas into museum programs. Since 1996 about 90% of “YES!” Team participants have gone on to attend college.

In the year 2000 the Hispanic dropout rate rested at 27.8%, compared to 7% for White, non-Hispanic students and 13% for Black, non-Hispanic students. These statistics are significant when considering the rapid population growth experienced by the Hispanic minority group. Studies show that in the year 2000 Hispanics comprised 12% of the total U.S. population, and it is estimated that this number will increase to 25% by the year 2050.

Former MOSI National Hispanic Scientist of the Year Award honorees
Dr. Louis A. Martin-Vega (2007), industrial engineer; Dr. Inés Cifuentes (2006), seismologist; Dr. Edmond J. Yunis (2005), physician, researcher, Harvard professor; Dr. Antonia Coello Novello (2004), former U.S. Surgeon General; Dr. Mario Molina, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry (2003); Fernando “Frank” Caldeiro, NASA Astronaut (2002); and Dr. Alejandro Acevedo-Gutiérrez, Marine Biologist (2001).

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MOSI is a not-for-profit, community-based institution and educational resource dedicated to advancing public interest, knowledge, and understanding of science, industry, and technology. With a total size of over 300,000 square feet, MOSI is the largest science center in the southeastern United States, and home to the only IMAX® Dome Theatre in the state of Florida.”*