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Art Review: Denver Post 2010 Art review: Traditional and contemporary takes on Hispanic art forms
By Kyle MacMillan Denver Post Fine Arts Critic Posted: 11/26/2010 01:00:00 AM MST
Unique to the Southwest is a distinctive, indigeneous style known as contemporary Spanish colonial art — predominantly religious pieces with a history that can be traced back more than 300 years. It is important to recall that the Spanish empire extended as far north as what is now southern Colorado. As in other parts of New Spain, immigrant and indigenous artists created rich, innovative variations on European Old Master paintings.
After Mexico gained its independence in 1821, New Mexico and Colorado were largely isolated, and the region's Hispanic art took on its own identity — one that has evolved but remained solidly rooted in Spanish colonial traditions. Thirteen Colorado artists who continue the contemporary Spanish colonial tradition are featured in "Santos 2010," an exhibition of more than 90 objects on view through Dec. 10 in Regis University's O'Sullivan Art Gallery.
Under the guidance of the Rev. Thomas Steele, who recently died, Regis began a collection of santos in 1966 that has since become one of the most important such holdings in the United States. Regis' gallery has sponsored four santos exhibitions since 1997, including this commendably wide-ranging one. Of particular note are the updated, sometimes witty sculptures by Denver santero Jerry Vigil. Examples include "St. Drogo, Patron Saint of Coffee," in which the carved medieval saint, popping out of a mug, is ensconced in a coffee can with a hinged door.
Kyle MacMillan
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2007 Diversity/Excellence Grant Award Recipients
The 2007 Diversity and Excellence Grant Awards were given to 12 projects in the University of Colorado System. The University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center was the recipient of six of the awards. Joann Brennan, College of Arts and Media, Charles M. Musiba, Department of Anthropology, & Stacy Fischer, Division of Health Care Policy and Research [in collaboration with Paula E. Cushing, Curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and local Chicano artist Jerry Vigil. Death and Dying: Cultural, Spiritual and Professional Perspectives: This project is a traveling exhibition and panel presentation that explores death and dying across cultural, spiritual and professional perspectives. The exhibition seeks to represent end-of-life issues in a culturally sensitive manner while exploring and celebrating the diverse ways that human beings approach the end of life. The target audience for the exhibit and presentation are the art venues located at all of the CU campuses. With anticipated opportunities to take the exhibition beyond CU, project collaborators intend to educate, build bridges, and inspire sensitivity about cultural and religious diversity to outside groups and communities.
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Best DIY Book With Local Ties, Westword
We love local santero Jerry Vigil, having bestowed a previous Best of Denver award on him for his cocky Colorado Rockies muerto, a traditional bare-bones Day of the Dead calavera dressed up in a Rockies uniform. And now we get to laud him all over again for Day of the Dead Crafts: More Than 24 Projects That Celebrate Día de los Muertos, a book he co-authored (with Kerry Arquette and Andrea Zocchi) and contributed to as an artist. Vigil said last fall that he hoped to help impart a more sophisticated understanding of the cultural traditions behind the whimsical Day of the Dead art. And we say he succeeded, without taking away an ounce of the genre's personality.
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La Voz Nueva 10/1/06 "The next most intriguing group of works comes from Jerry Vigil as reredos, bultos and very imaginative constructs. While devotion to the craft cannot be question, Vigil's works tend to spring from a left end perspective. For example, his death Card portrays Dona Sebastiani sitting on a box within her cart - taking a break by having a smoke. Yes of course, death smokes the two are closely related."
Don Bain
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"Magic Kingdom" Colorado Springs Independent
Real and surreal collide to infuse the BAC with color and history
by Edie Adelstein
Patty Ortiz has an affinity for Chicano magic. Not tricks, but supernatural themes that permeate Chicano and Latino literature and art. "There is a very strong influence of surrealism," says the executive director of Denver's Museo de las Américas. Ortiz organized and is guest curating Chicano Magic, which runs into November at the Business of Art Center. She invited 14 area Chicano artists from a previous Museo exhibition to return for this display, which includes oil paintings, prints, installations and collages. Many works feature historic figures like Frida Kahlo and Che Guevara, or skeletons from Day of the Dead celebrations. But BAC gallery director Mimi Mitchell notes that expected imagery is not the show's main focus. "It's not about looking typically ethnic," she says. "It's about exploring what they, as Chicano artists, are expressing." Several pieces clearly draw upon European themes. Hieronymus Bosch, for example, influences painter Santiago Perez's works. Jerry Vigil's "Vitruvian Muertos" (based off of Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man") is one of several works that lend lively blue skeletons to Western cultural situations. Along with positive aspects of Western influence, though, several artists also call attention to Chicano stereotypes and other hot issues, including commentaries on the current state of U.S.-Mexican immigration. See the dirty Styrofoam chest filled with "Halliburritos," by Daniel and Maruca Salazar. When the exhibition returns to the past, it does so with abundant color, and by reaching deep. Miraculous elements have a strong place in Chicano culture — and in this exhibit, as in all magic, there's much more than meets the eye. Chicano Magic
The Business of Art Center, 513 Manitou Ave., Manitou Springs
Runs through Nov. 3. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
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Web Extra: Optical illusion
Chicano Magic at the BAC looks good on paper but dissolves in person
by Edie Adelstein
Jerry Vigil, a Chicano artist, works a lot with what he calls muertos. These are skeletons that represent the dead in the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead. His skeletons are good-natured and humorous in the way they take on the vestments of regular people and popular culture. The idea of the skeletons imitating the living is common during the holiday, but Vigil takes them even farther out of their element and into a world where they are truly macabre and also truly charming. These works perfectly suit the Chicano Magic show, at the Business of Arts Center in Manitou Springs.
Many other Latino themes stream throughout; there are images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, tin altars and colorful neo-Aztec paintings. But alongside all these are works that do not belong. Museo de las Américas executive director Patty Ortiz worked with the BAC in creating this exhibit of area artists. Ortiz's inspiration for the show stems from her love of the supernatural in Latino arts, but only half the works in the show fit this bill. For every cackling muerto, there is another work that is random in subject matter, and negates the original idea. Some works possess heavy European motifs, like Santiago Perez's "Big Heads." In this oil painting, a giant head sits in a wooded pasture, its mouth wide open and gaping at the sky. It is a representation of the works of Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch, and his hellish scenes of insanity from the late middle ages. Perez puts his own spin on the concept with an acidic palette and smoky lines. But this exploration doesn't jibe with the more traditional ethnic fare featured in the rest of the show. In this description, Perez is not alone. The five panels of painter Quintin Gonzalez feature abstract drip works, garishly bright and intensely detailed with gobs of crisp colors swirling and spinning in a vortex. Like Perez, Gonzalez is an accomplished artist, and crowd pleaser, but the only reason he is in Chicano Magic is because he is Chicano.
The idea behind Chicano Magic is noble: to encapsulate what these chosen artists are studying in their fields, free from stereotypes. However, when half the artists follow a traditional stylistic path, and the other half study influences from all across the board, the show is simply not cohesive. It's too broad to squeeze into an exhibit of only 43 pieces. When the only thing holding the works together is the collective heritage — which, furthermore, is only conveyed through the title of the exhibit — it's unfair to the artists. — scene@csindy.com
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Westword
O Happy Dia! Westword Series soothsayer or Rockies remains? Denver artist Jerry Vigil made this player, ready to start in the Next World Series, in honor of the Day of the Dead and the Colorado Rockies' prowess in the World Series games played on this mortal coil. Love the concept? Get Vigil's Team Muertos T-shirt: . They're not Rockies-themed, but the purple-and-black hues are right on topic.
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Denver Post: 10/05/05: Artist Jerry Vigil, "Dean of the Dead"
You oughta know: Dean of the dead
By Colleen O'Connor
Day of the Dead, or Dia de los Muertos, is one of Mexico's biggest holidays. Based on traditional Aztec beliefs in the afterlife, Dia de los Muertos is celebrated each Nov. 1 and 2 with candlelight vigils in graveyards and at colorful altars at home.
To attract the souls of the departed, family members decorate these spaces with special ofrendas, or offerings. These might include photographs, flowers, toys, diplomas, favorite foods, even cigarettes and beer, if that's what the departed really loved. Particularly popular are skulls made of sugar, calaveras, and "bread of the dead," or pan de muerto.
Unfortunately, this colorful, life-affirming festival is often misinterpreted. Denver Post staff writer Colleen O'Connor talks with Jerry Vigil, a Chicano artist in Denver who specializes in muertos - or skeletons - who sheds new light on this ancient tradition.
When Dia de los Muertos crossed the border into the United States about the time in the 1970s that the Chicano movement began to grow, altars paying homage to family and friends who had passed away became more important than graveyard parties. Suddenly they became art, showcased in museums and galleries across the country. From toy coffins with pop-up skeletons to dead celebrities like Frida Kahlo serving up tacos and hot sauce, these altars blend devotion with offbeat creativity. Denver artist Jerry Vigil puts his own satirical spin on one of the holiday's most important symbols, the calavera, or skeleton, dressing them in contemporary threads and placing them in settings intended to reflect pride in Chicano culture.
Why do some people think Day of the Dead is a celebration of death? That comes from a lack of knowledge. A good way to look at Day of the Dead is like you had a gigantic family reunion with everyone in your family, from today all the way back to the origin of your family. It's a celebration and honoring of everything and everyone. People confuse it with death because the skeleton is used.
Well, the fun thing about muertos art is that it's so comical. It's full of frivolity. It's satirical and mocking, a way of lessening the power that
death holds over people in the Mexican culture. Western cultures are way more afraid of death than Mexican cultures. People die, you bury them in the ground and stay away. In Mexican culture - death is always looming over everyone, so people mock and make fun of it to lessen the power.
Why are Day of the Dead altars in Denver considered more artistic than those in Mexico? Chicano artists are curators of the culture, and it's a way to keep these traditions alive. So the altar becomes a thing of beauty, as well as functionality and purpose.
So on this day, the dead are believed to be right here with us? People believe the veil between the living and the dead is pulled aside, and the spirits walk freely past the veil. Being homebodies, they want to go home. The living realize they're coming and set up a celebration. They give them indicators how to get home and what to do.
The ancient Celts had the same tradition. Their Day of the Dead, also on Nov. 1, is called Samhain. I know, my wife is Irish. It's incredible how these things are.
still alive despite all attempts to assimilate them into the greater Western culture. In the Mexican culture, death isn't an end to life but part of a cycle. Western concepts make death the end, but with indigenous cultures, it's part of the cycle of life.
- Colleen O'Connor
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"New World My Eye" WESTWORD 9/3/04
If the title New World My Eye sounds a tad polemical, don't be daunted: The group exhibit debuting today at the Chicano Humanities and Arts Council may cast a critical Chicano eye on the dominant American culture, but it's intended to educate rather than to incite conflict. With that in mind, a multicultural audience would be just the ticket for tonight's reception. "With new census data coming out showing how Chicanos have become a force in the market, maybe it's time to start revisiting the issue of how we're perceived as a group," says show organizer Jerry Vigil, also a participating artist. Though the ironic juxtaposition of stereotype and reality was a familiar and recurring theme at chac shows, it's the star of this one, revisited in many ways this time around. Vigil, for instance, contributes a simple trio of skeleton carvings that depict standard Mexican-American archetypes: a revolutionary, a migrant worker and a cholo. "They will mean different things to different people," Vigil notes, hoping to encourage a dialogue between those viewing from the outside and those viewing on the inside.
Other contributions range from Sean Rozales's staged and digitally enhanced photographic re-creation of Mexican great Diego Rivera's image of a nude with flowers. And painter Tony Diego approaches the theme with an abstract triptych, symbolic of how dominant cultures throw a veil over subcultures, seeing but not understanding their alternate realities. Filmmaker/artist Daniel Salazar uses humor as a tool with his "weselloutsoyoudonthaveto.com" website, and Carlos Frésquez follows suit with his unstretched, grommeted canvas depicting a scene of the Taos Pueblo, where his great-grandfather lived, overlaid with two windows representing credit-card logos. They're labeled "Manifest" and "Destiny."
Susan Froyd
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From the Web: 04/08: Mosaic Globe Recipients: 2008 Creative Community Award For this Creative Community competition we selected from hundreds of entrants in four categories; photography, traditional mediums, visual art & Design, and Decorative and/or functional art. Below are the sites that we believe displayed the strongest portfolios in their respective categories as well as the honorable mentions. Take a moment to view their work and we think you'll agree.... Traditional Mediums: Jerry Vigil
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