Review Archive

22, Two
'Migration Uno': Ana Fuentes
'Grandeza Mexicana: Siglos XVI-XIX' at Mexic-Arte Museum

22, Two

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
May 20, 2005

One of the most exciting exhibitions organized by the Austin Museum of Art in recent years was "22 to Watch: New Art in Austin," the 2002 show that took seriously the work being done by mostly younger and frequently more experimental artists in the city and gave it serious exposure in a major museum exhibition. Now, AMOA Executive Director Dana Friis-Hansen, the mastermind behind the original "22 to Watch," is ready to launch its sequel. Along with AMOA adjunct curator James Housefield; director of exhibitions and education Eva Buttacavoli; Joan Davidow, director of the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art; and Clint Willour, curator of the Galveston Arts Center, Friis-Hansen has lined up the next 22 local artists whom we ought to keep our eyes on. They are:

After the show finishes its local run Aug. 20-Oct. 30 at the museum's downtown galleries, it hits the road, showing at the Galveston Arts Center, Nov. 26, 2005-Jan. 15, 2006, and the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, April 7-June 10, 2006. For more information, visit www.amoa.org.

Back to top

"Migration Uno": Ana Fuentes

Austin Chronicle
May 27, 2005

Gallery Shoal Creek, May 27-July 2

"Migration Uno," a collaborative inaugural exhibit organized by Vin Gallery and Gallery Shoal Creek, explores movement and identity from the perspective of four Latino artists: René Alvarado, Sandra Fernández, Gustavo Torres, and Ana Fuentes.

Like most of us, Ana Fuentes shares in a rich immigrant history. Born in Chicago to a Mexican physician and an American nurse of Eastern European descent, she spent her childhood in Mexico, with yearly visits to Chicago throughout her youth. She attended college in Greensville, N.C. She is a wife/divorcee/wife and a mother. She is enlivened by opera, literature, and art. As many artists have said of themselves, Fuentes has been compelled to create art since childhood. There is nothing extraordinary in these details.

What is extraordinary about Fuentes is that in her works she aims to attain emotional states and alter external circumstances that are not part of her physical environment. Through her paintings she can become bold, humble, vulnerable, or laughable. She can paint the world the way she wants it to be, shaping the places where it is safe to be raw, naked, and unashamed of existing. In the Survivor series, the hair of the characters composes emotional landscapes: isolated caverns, rooms full of tears, the shadow of a perpetrator, and ringlets of hope. In these oil and graphite works, Fuentes solidifies our compassion for the characters, and we realize that they only need a birth certificate to be in this moment and in this place where we are now.

'Grandeza Mexicana: Siglos XVI-XIX' at Mexic-Arte Museum

Agreement with Mexican council brings four centuries of art and artifacts to Austin museum

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
May 27, 2005

Want to glimpse a few of Mexico's many museums in 30 minutes or less -- without leaving town? Then head to Mexic-Arte Museum, where you can now view tiny tidbits of treasures. "Grandeza Mexicana: Siglos XVI-XIX (The Greatness of Mexico: 16th-19th Centuries)" offers a microsurvey of four centuries of Mexican colonial, republican, revolutionary and imperial art.

The exhibit emanates from an agreement the Congress Avenue museum struck in 2003 with Mexico's National Council of Culture and Arts. This is the first of a series of traveling exhibits culled from a range of Mexico's many government museums, supported in part by a $200,000 federal grant.

It is historical? Is it comprehensive? Certainly the San Antonio Museum of Art's Rockefeller Center for Latin American Art provides Central Texans a permanent opportunity to see a vastly larger and superior grouping of Mexican colonial art and artifacts. But this temporary show at least delivers a snapshot of European-influenced artistic output, dating from the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the early 16th century to the dawn of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20.

The exhibit opens with a small nod to indigenous culture by way of a replica of a stone Mixtec codex which shows the highly styled hieroglyphs of these mountain people. Running along one wall, an enormous backlit color photograph shows a contemporary view of the temple ruins in the Mayan city of Oxmal. The photo towers over a small case that displays replicas of 16th-century catechisms Spanish friars composed entirely from images in order to instruct indigenous people in the Catholic faith. Nearby sits a suit of elaborate conquistador armor. The link to Spain's religious and military conquest of Mexico is impossible to miss.

Among the artifacts from the 17th century is a large painting of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Now Mexico's patron saint, the Virgen is said to have appeared to an Indian named Juan Diego on the razed Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1531, a scant 10 years after the fall of the Aztec empire. Her image is the subject of several artworks throughout the exhibit, including an exquisitely embroidered tapestry from the 17th century that hangs next to a painting of the same era depicting the founding of Tenochtitlan.

The gold and silver riches that the Spanish found in Mexico are perhaps nowhere better seen in "Grandeza Mexicana" than in a resplendent ceremonial riding robe used by Catholic priests. Enormously broad (in order to cover both rider and horse), the blood-red robe is adorned with grand and detailed appliques of silver thread, with the year of the robe's creation, 1699, embroidered in the center.

When the Bourbons ascended to the Spanish throne at the beginning of the 18th century, they tried by wresting control of their Mexican colonyout of the hands of the Catholic church and opening it to more immigrants. Replicas of paintings showing the "Sixteen Social Types of New Spain" demonstrate the now-offensive manner in which the Spanish categorized people by race and social standing.

The military dominates the items from the 19th century, the last section of "Grandeza Mexicana." An army dress coat, an elaborately detailed rifle, multiple portraits of military leaders and commemorative maps offer a stately -- if predictable and traditional -- overview of Mexico's first century of independence from Spain. Like the rest of the exhibit, it's just a sample of the grand and complex history of a grand and complex country.

It's a shame that so much of the exhibit consists of replicas and weak interpretive displays, rather than a full rendering of Mexico's historical grandness. Then again, Mexic-Arte's limited exhibition space does not allow for the grand gestures -- nor the attendant hype -- of a major museum show.