Mexico City Day 1

Mexico City has an incredible variety of museums. Our first time there, we saw many of the Diego Rivera murals, aa wonderful exhibit of Folk Art and the stunningly vast Museo Nacional de Antropología, which covers the enormous amount of history of the hundreds of unique language-group cultures that have existed in Mexico over the ages and can probably occupy a year of your time. We decided to smaller bites this time.

This trip was a short one. We selected the lovely Four Seasons hotel so that we would have a peaceful reprieve from the craziness of the traffic and crowds.

view into the courtyard from our room

 walking in the courtyard

Last time we were in Mexico City, we saw an extraordinary folk art at the Palaca de Cultural Banamex that we decided to go to the Museo de Arte Popular (Museum of Popular Art). Sometimes when one attempts to recapture a past experience it is a failure, but not so this time. The museum re-created for us the sense of exuberant, abundant color, joy and imagination that characterizes Mexican folk Art.
We were greeted by a fantastical collection of parade-float dragons in the courtyard of the museum:

We were very struck by the plethora of skeletons that are part of the folk art tradition—we theorized it is a way of defusing the fear of death but apparently it has its roots in pre-Hispanic culture and is reflected in the way that the pre-Columbian peoples indigenized Catholicism, replacing Satan with Demon imagery and incorporating the Day of the Dead into christian religious practice.

 Scenes from life inhabited by skeletons, in a wonderful variety of settings. Very macabre to our Anglo eyes

 Even children in school portrayed as skeletons.

Elegant Lady Skeleton.
















At another exhibit (back at the exhibit space in Palaca de Cultura Banmex) we happened on another small exhibition, this time on Mexican architecture, which included this picture of Diego Rivera's studio, which I think adds illustratively to my collection of skeletons, reinforcing what a singularly Mexican trope this is.

The imagination is not limited to the folk art or the museums. The broad avenue of Paseo de la Reforma Avenue, which we walked to and from the museum, alternated its original old stone benches with different contemporary interpretations of the "bench.

Original stonework benches seen throughout the Avenue

Here are some of the new interpretations of a bench:

 Iron sofas

 Curvileinears

Twist and shout

Gin rummy, anyone?

Every other block is back to the original stonework benches that dot the avenue.

Rubin Museum 14 Bialik Street

Rueven Rubin, painter, born Romania 1893, died Israel 1974,

We were so busy preparing my daughter's Bat Mitzva on this visit that I didn't get to do much other than eat hummus (!) However one afternoon Irad and I went across the street to a very small museum on Bialik Street. It is right next to the better known Bialik House, down the street from the Museum of the History of Tel Aviv, and it is a little gem of a museum set in the artist's house-turned-museum. The third floor of the house is his actual studio, preserved as if he were still at work.

It is an enchanting museum that can be seen in an hour (my favorite kind), and not necessarily on the mainstream tourist path. But I found myself lost in the past and bathed in the feeling of an earlier time, through the naive yet sensuous luminosity of the paintings. The late days of Palestine and early days of Israel were laced with hardship, but for the artist with imagination they were a veritable paradise of visual exotica.

The exhibit currently on display was brilliant - it took paintings by Rubin and juxtaposed them with carefully researched archival photographs that showed nearly identical scenes from the same time. One could get a very clear sense of the sights to which Rubin responded in his paintings.

Rubin was one of the founders of the Eretz-Yisrael style. They were fascinated with the special Mediterranean light—so different from their native European countries— and the  landscapes,

folkloric-like scenes of Jewish life,

 the Arab and Yemenite peoples,

 biblical-like scenery,

the early settlement city-scapes,

and biblical stories.

There is a very interesting documentary about Rubin that plays at the museum. He speaks of starting off with only four colors of paint, because that is all he saw in the early days: sand, and sky.

self portrait with flower   

The flower represents himself ready to flourish as an artist. And later his palate expands considerably!

Bialik Street is a great way to spend an afternoon, with the small museums in their original buildings and the historic cafe at the entrance to the street with its nightly jazz music. Rubin House itself is well worth an hour of time to lose oneself in another world, yet a world that is still visible through the current urban collage of modern Tel Aviv.

Exhibit Review: James Nares' "STREET"— A Night out at the Reinberger Galleries

The Cleveland Institute of Art's (CIA) Reinberger Gallery has seasonal exhibitions that we've come to enjoy over the last few years, especially since our oldest son began studying there. What particularly motivated us to go down to the exhibit opening was that James Nares, whose film STREET is featured, is the partner of a friend of ours, a lovely woman we've gotten to know over the past two summers in Vermont.  It always gives one a stronger connection to and interest in an exhibition if there is a personal connection to the artist.

STREET was beautiful and well worth the visit—mesmerizing and evocative. (Thankfully—because otherwise what do you tell your friend!?) We lived in NYC for 6 years and we still think of it as an alternate home so it was enjoyable to have that kind of immersive return and see it in such a broad yet focused way. Also technically very impressive! 



And of course we did that thing which I'm sure anyone who has spent time in NY has done - Oh, that's the Path corner, oh, that's right by X's apartment, Oh, isn't that where there used to be that bodega where I picked up flowers on the way home? But the real stars are the thousands of faces. Everyone looks so beautiful and interesting in the HD slow-mo—I imagine that reflects the artist's own loving feelings about humanity.

Here is the explanatory blurb from the CIA webiste: British-born artist James Nares spent one week in September 2011 filming 16 hours of footage from a moving car traveling the streets of Manhattan. He used the kind of high-definition camera usually reserved for capturing speeding bullets ripping through apples, then edited the footage down to one hour of super-slow-motion street activity put to music. The result is a trippy, dreamlike experience that played at The Metropolitan Museum of Art this past spring and will air on a loop in CIA’s Black Box Projection Room.

And we did get to say hello to James!

Other things you will see at the  exhibit are recent works by Richard Anuszkiewicz, that play with our perceptions of color and seem to swim before the eyes in huge vivid paintings that come off the walls.

 

 Photo from CIA site, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Mardi Gras. Image courtesy of Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, NY.

 

  

Also there, Intricately detailed print work by Suzanne Treister, in a show called Hexen 2.0 and looks at the history of scientific research. I like the use of Tarot Cards as the organizing principle.

From CIA site: Suzanne Treister, Queen of Chalices- Ada Lovelace. Image courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W Gallery, NYC.

And a third and also very different exhibition of paintings by Arpita Singh, called Men in Turmoil. Less visually appealing to me than the other artists.

 From CIA Site: Arpita Singh, Women in Blue Men in Black. Image Courtesy Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, India and DC Moore Gallery, New York.

The great thing about going to Reinberger exhibitions is that they are a manageable amount of gallery space to get through in one evening, and still have time for dinner in Little Italy!