A
U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent drove along the international
border fence near Nogales, Ariz in September 2010. 
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On
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Above
Picture of the original family house on Beckham Street, Alice, Texas. It was there were eight of the fourteen children of Samuel and Santos Saenz were born and raised. This is a modern day
picture of the house after it was re-modeled in the early 1950s. It was sold to Johnny
Bernal, an old friend from the community, in 1956. The house had three bedrooms ands a kitchen. a
bathroom was added during the re-modeling and this was after the city of Alice finally brought the sewer lines to that part of the town (El Barrio del Alto).
In 1910 a California company produced a tourist postcard
showing a flatbed railroad car rumbling across the
sun-drenched Golden State, hauling just two strawberries.
Each fruit was roughly the size of a pachyderm. The picture
is an early example of what soon became a flood of
promotional images that cast the place as an exotic but
industrious region of unimaginable wonders.
Mars always needs women, but early 20th century California needed to attract people too. A picture of gargantuan strawberries might not be taken literally by the postcard's bemused recipient, but the enticing enthusiasm of its message was clear.
Although the "big berries" pitch today appears quaint, it was hardly unprecedented. Not by a long shot. About 125 years before, similar representations were made in Ecuador.
At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a large and engrossing new show includes four big canvases painted in 1783 by Vicente Albán. Just a few of the 181 rarely traveled works assembled for "Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World," Albán's paintings overflow with arresting super-abundance. Guavas are as big as your head. Plantains swell to the size of baseball bats. Pineapples are gigantic and, yes, strawberries are big enough to make a meal for the whole family.
Not unlike the modern postcard, these colonial canvases were surely designed to reach the folks back home -- meaning, in this case, Spain or elsewhere in Europe. Since an 18th century European would need to be told what exotic South American wonder he was ogling, an elaborately painted cartouche contains an alphabetized key labeling each fruit. In good Enlightenment-era fashion, natural history and precise classification were prized.
Mars always needs women, but early 20th century California needed to attract people too. A picture of gargantuan strawberries might not be taken literally by the postcard's bemused recipient, but the enticing enthusiasm of its message was clear.
Although the "big berries" pitch today appears quaint, it was hardly unprecedented. Not by a long shot. About 125 years before, similar representations were made in Ecuador.
At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a large and engrossing new show includes four big canvases painted in 1783 by Vicente Albán. Just a few of the 181 rarely traveled works assembled for "Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World," Albán's paintings overflow with arresting super-abundance. Guavas are as big as your head. Plantains swell to the size of baseball bats. Pineapples are gigantic and, yes, strawberries are big enough to make a meal for the whole family.
Not unlike the modern postcard, these colonial canvases were surely designed to reach the folks back home -- meaning, in this case, Spain or elsewhere in Europe. Since an 18th century European would need to be told what exotic South American wonder he was ogling, an elaborately painted cartouche contains an alphabetized key labeling each fruit. In good Enlightenment-era fashion, natural history and precise classification were prized.
Sometimes
the colossal fruits are piled on the ground, surrounded by
green tropical lushness. Mostly, though, they're displayed
atop baroque stone pedestals. A giant guava in the fertile
jungle becomes the functional equivalent of a heroic warrior
commemorated by a bronze sculpture in an important civic
plaza, or perhaps a religious saint's statue venerated in a
church. Ecuador, then in the late stages of the Spanish
Viceroyalty of Peru that stretched along the Pacific coast,
gobbling up what once had been the powerful Inca empire, is
cast as a prosperous New World Eden.Albán's paintings, however, don't just display fruit. Also shown are Amerindians, lavishly dressed in indigenous or colonial costumes. They offer up nature's super-abundance, smiling and gesturing benignly. These embellished figures belie the equivalence to slavery that many endured in service to Catholic Spain's imperial ambitions, just as many had to their Inca overlords. Like the fruits, the people are also catalogued within the cartouche, as if their distance from European humanity was simply assumed.
The exhibition is filled with remarkable works whose undeniable beauty mixes with inescapable strangeness. (Ponder a painting that shows an Indian praying at the barred gate of a cloistered Capuchin nun.) The magnificent show, organized by LACMA curator Ilona Katzew, is the first in the U.S. to chart the roles assumed by and for indigenous peoples within colonial Latin American art.
Its only drawback is the absence of a catalog. A handsome companion book has been published, complete with 12 scholarly essays. But it doesn't include an exhibition checklist, while many of the show's works -- including Albán's -- are not discussed. That's a shame.
The viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru spanned most of three centuries and covered huge territories, starting in the Southern United States and reaching all the way into Argentina. Dominated by the Aztec and Inca empires when European colonization began, these vast regions also were home to scores of indigenous groups. Each had its own cultural traditions.
Neither were the conquerors monolithic in outlook, habit or alliances. New Spain's history is rich and complex. That makes for sometimes difficult navigation within the show, but "rich" and "complex" also describe the art.
The exhibition's six sections open with Aztec and Inca sculptures and textiles, principally from the powerful ancient cities of Tenochtitlan and Cuzco. They range from monumental to miniature.
A looming, 15th century terra cotta "Eagle Warrior," its life-size figure adorned in a ferocious costume crowned by the yawning beak of a screaming bird, once guarded the Aztec capital's main temple. (It was also seen at the Getty Villa last year in "The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire.") The magnificent avian imagery echoes against the brilliantly colored feathered-tunics installed nearby, made a world away for earlier Peruvian burial sites.
Aztec and Inca ceremonial art sets up the impending clash with the Catholicism of invading Spanish armies, surveyed in the show's second section. Pictures of St. Augustine and St. John the Evangelist, sacred to the conquerors, are composed from iridescent feathers, sacred to the conquered. Celestial carvings on a stone baptismal font, repurposed from an Aztec sacrificial basin, assume new religious meanings. Old Peruvian textile patterns filter into new liturgical garments.
That's
very different from European Baroque paintings, in which
artists cranked up eye-popping illusions of the world as a
theatrical stage for the enactment of salvation. Europeans
needed to combat the barren iconoclasm of the Protestant
Reformation, but that type of pictorial theater didn't
matter in Mexico and Peru, since Protestantism hardly
existed. European Baroque paintings elaborated space, but
colonial Baroque paintings elaborated surfaces.
For over seventy years, Molly
Picon, star of Yiddish theater and film, delighted audiences with her comic song and dance performances. While her career began in vaudeville and flourished in the Second Avenue theaters of New York's Lower East Side, Picon later performed on stage and in Yiddish and Hollywood films for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences around the world. Her engaging persona and powerful performances helped keep Yiddish culture alive by bringing it out of the shtetl and into mainstream American culture. Although Picon always played assertive characters on stage, for many years she struggled to be taken seriously as an independent woman and actress.
Ultimately, however, she emerged as an icon for second generation American Jews and helped her audiences appreciate their immigrant past and forge new American Jewish identities.
