Her name is Katherine and she is an artist.

One Foot In the Midwest

Back home in Ohio, Katherine had a typical midwestern upbringing. She and her sisters lived in a town where their father owned a restaurant. Katherine showed artistic talent in high school, and watched one of her older sisters go off to Yale Univeristy to study Fine Art. Contrary to the family’s expectations, after graduation, the sister became a nurse. When it was time for Katherine to go to college, her dad was not inclined to pay for art school, so Katherine went to nursing school instead. She eventually added social work and liberal arts to her studies, but her father was adamant about one thing: No Art!

One Giant Step to the Yucatan

To be an artist is to be compelled to create something new and different. Artists are inventors and interpreters, and they are comfortable with pushing limits. That type of personality combined with the natural curiosity of a young adult doesn’t tend to find satisfaction in a small midwest town. When Katherine and her sister went on a graduation trip to Cancun, she met Luis, the man who would later become her husband… and the trajectory of her typical American life changed forever. Before she knew it, she had left Ohio and moved to Merida, Yucatan to start a life with her new love.

That life quickly expanded to take up all of her time and attention. Together, Katherine and Luis had four children (now all teenagers or older), while Luis ran the Yucatan-based family business. That left Katharine running the family, raising her children, and learning to fit into the Yucatan culture, which left little time for the art that she felt born to.

The Creative Imperative

Natural-born creativity, though, has a way of bubbling, boiling and escaping into any activity and what better place to apply creative ideas than in the service of raising children? Katherine started illustrating children’s books for her own children. She worked on a park project in La Ceiba, where she was part of a team that turned an abandoned lot into a shady park with pathways, playgrounds and whimsical touches, including the cement dinosaur fossil feet… a foreshadowing of the work she is doing today. When Gerda Gruber announced her first and only class for sculpture in 2001, Katharine applied and, referencing the various projects she had created for her children, was accepted.

Although she had never worked in clay or any sculpted medium before, within two weeks of starting the class, Katharine knew this was what she wanted to do with her energy. The tactile expressiveness that the clay invited satisfied a hunger in her that drawing in two dimensions never had. Of the twelve people that started the class, Katharine was one of the nine who graduated.

Like others in the class, Katharine was ready to begin working at her art and bringing it to the public. But before she could get started, an opportunity arose for the entire family to spend a year in France and they took it. With no ability or time to set up a studio, Katharine reverted to home and child care when she wasn’t traveling and soaking in the 24-hour-a-day art lesson that is Europe. Every museum, every garden, every plate of food was a chance to study and learn aesthetics, and Katharine returned to Merida, full of experiences and hungering to create.

Art Work

She came back determined to make art her job. She set up her studio in the back of her house, took correspondence courses from the Academy of Art in San Francisco, and started working. The project for the park had piqued her interest in fossils, and the months in Europe had sparked a fascination for the impact that historical records have upon living people. She started working with a Cretaceous fish fossil from the pycnosteroididae family. The fish had died out in the Cretaceous era, 144-65 million years ago, and had left no descendants. The fish itself had originally been very tiny, only 4.3 centimeters long, but when she enlarged the fossil and recreated it in concrete, she was struck not only by its primeval beauty but by its journey. An imprint of its skeleton was all it had left behind, and yet, here it was again, an idea being brought back into existence. Lifted from its surroundings, isolated and enlarged, the fossil was bizarre, primitive and ghostly.

Encouraged by her results, Katherine’s experimentation took two directions. She experimented in materials and techniques, while simultaneously experimenting in shapes, concepts and design. Her kiln wasn’t large enough to hold the pieces she had in mind, so she began with concrete, learning the recipe from an albañile, and expanding upon it. She experimented with sand, ground stone and even saskab, a stone ingredient the Mayans used in building their monuments. She bought her own cement mixer, and experimented with formulas and mixing techniques. When cement proved to be too brittle for the large but delicate pieces she had in mind, she experimented with old newspaper, ground shells and other materials. She eventually turned to resin, adding in cement, saskab and pigments to expand her options for texture, color and finishes. The resin she works with now is not as ecologically friendly as she would like it to be, because it can be dangerous (she wears a gas mask to avoid inhaling the resin dust when she works). But resin provides the lightness and flexibility she needed to create the large, lacy structures that she envisioned.

Some of her latest work has been with butterfly wings… but wings so magnified and abstracted that they are not recognizable at first. The structure of the decoration of the wing informs the resin pieces… they can be mounted as sconces or sculptures on the wall, or used on a table as sculptures or even as a plate to hold fruit. Katherine has no preconceived ideas about how you are going to use her work. She purposely creates it to be both strong and light. Unlike the clay she started with, resin makes the pieces durable enough to do almost anything you have in mind, inviting you to join her in the neverending creative process. In fact, Katherine’s art bends at times toward the practical, crossing that blurry line between art and design, and Katherine has no problem with that.

Her latest project began with the fossil of a fish called Seymouria, a reptile-like tetrapod (according to Wikipedia) whose skeleton is found in Texas. Katharine’s stylized version of Seymouria is being rendered in resin, but Katharine is still experimenting with the right mix that will allow her to sculpt both sides, creating a three-dimensional representation of a two-dimensional fossil record. She intends to work both sides of the finished product, so the fellow’s ribs and feet and other characteristics will be detailed on both sides. The end result will be a quasi-fossil, as if the animal it represents is itself rising out of the record it left behind millions of years ago.

With most of her fossil-based works, she starts from the photograph of the fossil, then draws it. From the drawing she forms a sculpture in clay and plastilina, from which she makes a silicon mold. The mold is used to make just ten reproductions, each one of which is then cleaned, polished, and detailed by hand. Each piece may also be painted and all are sealed.

She has created works in color, although most of our favorites were the ones in black, greys and white. She has created works with finishes that resemble bronze, stone or paper. Some of the works in her studio the day we photographed were multiples of her original fish fossil, a concrete version of an enlarged shell, a broken version of another fish fossil sculpture done on commission, multiple butterfly-wing sculptures in round, bent and linear forms, floral designs lifted from Nasstrom fabrics especially for their store, and the beginnings of the Seymouria series.

Her studio is filled with the dust of activity, and everywhere are molds, failed experiments, sculptures ready to ship and treasured remembrances. She finds herself with a studio that most artists would envy, looking out over the manicured garden, swimming pool and children’s jungle gym that frame her life. Inside the frame, there is not a sedentary painting, but a three-dimensional menagerie that is shifting in time, magnification, color and material, straining to escape two dimensionality and history.

As many women do, Katharine admits to sublimating her creative ideas and desires to the daily responsibilities of motherhood and marriage. She created a beautiful, art-filled home with creative touches everywhere, but as many women have, she found herself straining at the millions of spiderweb ties that each day held her back from making her art. Now, with grown children, she is brimming with ideas and plans for larger sculptures, like one that will fill a room with the twisting bones of a serpent. She has placed some of her sculptural pieces at the local Nasstrom store, where they beautifully complement the modern furniture sold there. She has visions of integrating her designs into the walls of houses, or laying them end-to-end to become the walls themselves. Now finally, with education, experience, travel and time inside her and with her own permission, Katherine de Barrueta is picking up speed and momentum, quietly exploding into hypercreativity.

Like the woman who created it, Katherine’s art speaks quietly. When Katherine speaks out in the world, she is a soft-spoken woman who seems to have effortlessly absorbed into her personality the famous Yucatecan graciousness. In her studio, where she opens her heart to her work and her ideas, she communicates her passion, her fierce love for the natural world and her even fiercer need to share the beauty of it with others.

Katherine’s pieces are deceptively decorative at first. Like many things in nature, when you quiet your mind and spend time with them, they speak. They whisper of places and events far, far away in time and space. They invite a child’s wonder for fossils and dinosaurs and butterflies and a scientific fascination for the worlds found in a microscope. And they pose the ubiquitous questions that we all live with, but seldom allow ourselves to ask… Why are we here, if the only thing we leave behind are these huellas? What is the impact of what we leave behind? Why does it matter and who does it matter to? What is it exactly that survives? And what will I leave behind? What will be MY legacy that someday, someone, somewhere will see and appreciate?

Katherine de Barrueta and her art invite us first and foremost, to enjoy their intrinsic beauty, lifted from nature and enhanced by the hands of the artist. And then her pieces invite us to question and reflect. And when we walk away, we find the pieces themselves and the questions they ask have left their huellas in our memories.

*****

The Foundation of Gerda Gruber, Katherine’s teacher and a local sculptor. Katherine’s page

Huellas Designs website

Nasstrom furniture store in Merida

The last available of Katherine’s original Fish Fossil pieces is available for sale at Colomer.

The first AANY exhibition was in November 2008; the second was in March, 2009, and the third, ARTE A MANO, was at the Club de Leones, on the weekend of December 5-6, 2009. According to Joan Farrell, the director, "attendance has grown amazingly and sales have far exceeded expectations. Our events have become much anticipated in the Merida community, and we now have the endorsement of the Instituto de Cultura de Yucatan (ICY). ARTE A MANO was even featured as a part of the ICY Otoño Cultural, 2009."

Personally, we can vouch for that. Having attended the last few AANY shows, we have learned to only put as much money in our pocket as we will allow ourselves to spend, because the temptations are great. At the last show we picked up woven floormats from Campeche, earrings and rings, beautiful little salt holders carved from bull’s horns, an incredibly original painted hemp shawl and various gourd masks and vases. Many of these purchases were given as Christmas presents to our loved ones back in the States, and they were much appreciated. One of our favorite purchases is pictured on the left. It is a stick, smoothed and painted to represent an eagle (on the top), and a snake (the green part on the right)… the two animals that figure in the story of the origin of Mexico.

Part of AANY’s mission is to work closely with the artists to improve their products, refine their displays and seek new markets for their work. They sponsored a very successful workshop at the Habla School for artists to offer guidance on how to improve their displays, led by a local resident, Craig LaBerge, who is a museum exhibit designer in another life. In the future AANY plans to offer more workshops by and for their artists. They have made it clear that they encourage galleries, retail stores and designers to attend the events to find new resources. Many of the AANY artists have received special orders from clients who have seen their work at these events.

AANY Spring Show 2010

The next ARTE A MANO will be Saturday, March 20th, 10AM-7PM, and Sunday, March 21st, 10AM-5PM.

This AANY show will be held at a new location: Coparmex, Avenida Hildalgo X 38th, in Colonia García Ginéres. Avenida Hidalgo is the continuation of Avenida Colon on the west side of Itzaes, after going around the Donde Glorieta. Continue past the IMSS hospital on the left and go one more block. You’ll see the Comparmex building there, as well as a bunch of cars parked in the area.

We hear the new location is a good one – a huge, enclosed space with air conditioning (which is daily becoming more important again, now that the nortes seem to be over), and there is a parking lot in back of the building (Okay, we take that back about the cars… look for the parking lot). Coparmex is a nationwide association of business owners and they will be getting the word out to all their members and email lists. The crowd at this show promises to be bigger than ever, so take it from us: If you want your pick of the new and beautiful things, go early.

Additionally, there is an enclosed patio space where visitors can sit down, relax with food and beverages, and regroup for another pass through the show. They have made promises that there might be better food than popcorn and Cokes this time, but really, we don’t go for the food, do we?

New Arts and Crafts Talent

The AANY team has continued combing villages near and far on the Yucatan Peninsula for exciting new craft talent… well, new to us, but mostly these are experienced craftspeople who know little or nothing of the possible market here in Merida. Of the roughly 40 participating artists, there will be about 12 new artists participating, such as:

• from San Felipe, fabulous sculptural mobiles made of shells
• Maya and Aztec replicas (like the one pictured at the start of this article) by a master from Tulum
• utilitarian but lovely hampers made of palm from Calkini
• fused glass objects and jewelry by an artist from Playa
• a collection of exhibition one-of-a-kind hats made of hipi from Becal
• and several new lamp makers.

As always, AANY tries to maintain a balance of studio craft with rural work, and hope that these shows and the attention from AANY and the customers can be instrumental in furthering the traditional crafts of the villages. The tapete makers from the last show were a sell-out in 1 1/2 hours in December! Apparently, they desperately want to return for the March show, but have run out of raw materials. Locally, the patete plant that is used to make these tapetes is not harvested until April or May. Thanks to the help of another of the AANY artists, they may be able to get material shipped in from Tabasco. Come to the show and find out!

The arms of ANNY continue to extend. Eight AANY artists were invited to participate in the recent Chili Cookoff sponsored by the Merida English Library, there is discussion with a local TV station about doing news segments focusing on cultural events supported by the international community, and artists keep reporting increased sales in their studios resulting from the distribution of their business cards at the shows.

Part of AANY’s long-term goal is to encourage the participating artists to assume a proactive role in producing the shows in the future. This is starting to work. One artist has taken over the responsibility of placing visiting artists in private homes to avoid hotel expenses. Another has taken over the proposed placement of several large banners on and around the Donde traffic circle and several artists are acting as buddies to work with first-time exhibitors to improve their displays. In addition, they have begun to accompany the AANY explorers on those endless road trips that are required to find the new artists. The AANY artists are beginning to interact with each other and more and more of them want to be part of the process. Eventually, the current AANY management hopes to work itself out of a job almost completely.

Come to the AANY show and show your support and your interest in the art and craft of the Yucatan. With your help, AANY will continue to grow and diversify in the future… a win/win situation for all concerned!

Read more about AANY here and here.

Dates: Saturday, March 20th, 10AM-7PM, and Sunday, March 21st, 10AM-5PM.

Location: (see map above): Coparmex, Avenida Hildalgo X 38th, in Colonia García Ginéres

We were thinking ourselves fortunate lately, therefore, that within our own small English-speaking expatriate community in Merida, there are some who continue literary pursuits in our native language. Of course, we have as our literary home base the Merida English Language Library, a treasure trove of books written in English in a city where those are hard to find. We also have the Amate Bookstore, an outpost of its larger headquarters in Oaxaca.

And of course, we have writers in our midst! Recently, our good friend Beryl Gorbman published a novel called 2012:The Deadly Awakening (click on the title to download the ebook, which we were pleased to discover we can and intend to read on our Kindle).

Yucatan’s Literary Tradition in English

There is, of course, a literary tradition of expatriates writing about the Yucatan, starting as far back as John Stevens and his Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, Vols. I and II. Type in "Yucatan" on Amazon.com and you’ll find over 3700 books of Literature & Fiction that mention this fair land, 276 of which are under the category of Poetry. Poetry, however, is a large literary umbrella that casts its shadow over many things (including, apparently, this little ditty:

I had an Aunt in Yucatan
Who bought a Python from a man…

-Hillaire Beloc in Cautionary Tales for Children

We are not here today to talk about THAT kind of poetry, though it, too, has its place. We are here because we recently met a man who makes his home in Yucatan (yes, it rhymes…we can’t help ourselves) and who calls himself a poet. We don’t often meet people who, when asked what they do, say they are poets. It’s just not something you run across every day, and certainly it is unusual here. Although, upon pondering the subject, it really shouldn’t be unusual, because the Yucatan is nothing if not poetic.

Doug Tanoury, Poet

The subject of our interview today, then, is a poet named Doug Tanoury. Half the time, Doug lives in Detroit, Michigan, a place on the planet not known for its poetic nature. And the other half of the year, Doug (and his wife Robin) live here in Merida, practically a pozo of poetry, not for the plethora of poets plying the streets, mind you, but for the profusion of poetry-worthy moments that permeate every person’s experience of life in Merida and the Yucatan.

Doug’s poems that are available on the internet don’t seem to be about his life in Merida. In the spring of 2006, Merida decided to claim Doug and Robin for her own and invited them to join our tribe of merry expats. Since then, they have bought and inhabited a home near L’Ermita and steeped themselves in this exotic and poetry-inspiring place. But so far, the poetry we have read, does not talk to us of Merida. Though we have found an occasional mention of a hammock or two, mostly these poems take place where "…the sycamores that line the banks still show all the signs of summer" and "…the song of an oriole is different from the chirp of a sparrow".

Interview with Doug
YL: When did you move to the Yucatan and what made you choose this place? 
Doug: We first visited Merida in the Spring of 2006 quite by accident. We had booked a cruise but our plane had engine problems, so we missed our boat… literally!  The airline was obligated to get us to our first port of call, which was Progreso, and which, as luck would have it, has no airport.  We spent the next three days in beautiful Merida waiting for our ship to come in.  As we eventually realized, it already had: our time waiting turned out to be the highlight of our vacation.  I am always amazed how the most significant things in life happen quite by accident. A friend told us that you do not choose Merida, but rather Merida chooses you.  I think that was true for Robin and me.  We feel fortunate to have been chosen. 

 
YL: What makes you choose to be here half time?  
Doug: Robin and I would both prefer to live here in Merida, full time.  However, family commitments keep us bouncing back and forth. One day… 

 
YL: Has poetry been your career? 
Doug: My occupation has always been in high technology and computers, and for many years I have been a management consultant.  My area of expertise is customer service and contact centers.  This is how I have earned a living for many years. Poetry has not been my career, but rather my vocation.  I always smile when I say this, because I went to a catholic school and the nuns who taught me always stressed the difference between an occupation and a vocation.  An occupation is what you choose to do and it allows you to make a living and pay the bills, but a vocation is what God has chosen for you to do. 

 
YL: How would you describe your poetry? 
Doug: What makes this question difficult to answer is that my work changes over the years, and will more than likely continue to do so.  It has moved through stages or phases and how I would describe it depends on the stage I happened to be in.  Some things about my work are constant and span stylistic phases.  What does not seem to change is that my work is a poetry of the ordinary and everyday that is touched and transformed into something that is extraordinary and novel. It is very personal, and it is through the personal that the universal finds expression.  My poetry uses a simple vocabulary, not a literary language.  I feel that poetry should be understandable and accessible to everyone. 

    
YL: Has living here been a challenge or enhancement to your creativity? 
Doug: Merida is such a magical place, so I can only say that my creativity has been enhanced by the high level of artistic activity here.  This is a culturally rich environment.  Art is everywhere: it is like the air here.  So I feel that I am living in a renaissance city, where music, dance, film, painting and sculpture, poetry and literature all flourish together.  You would have to have a heart of stone not to be inspired in Merida.  It is a city that is perfect for a poet.

 
YL: Is poetry welcomed in the Yucatan?  
Doug: Both the Mexican culture in general and Yucatecan culture in particular welcomes and values poetry to a much higher degree than I have experienced anywhere.  It is integrated into political speeches, social gatherings, education and entertainment.  Poetry has a place in everyday life here.  It lives here.  Eugenia Montalván Colón at Unas Letras has been very active in publishing local poets.

 
YL: Did you speak Spanish before coming here?  If not, are you learning to speak Spanish? 
Doug: No, I knew no Spanish when I first arrived.  I have found the language to be very rich and interesting.  It provides me a different way to look at the world, and I relish the difference.  I have studied Spanish at Habla, where the arts are used to teach Spanish and build literacy.  I find that it is the best approach for me.  If you touch an emotional chord in me, it is an aid to both my learning and memory.

   
YL: What is the source of the images in your poetry? 
Doug: The imagery in my poetry comes from the same place as dreams.  There are a great many similarities between poetry and dreams.  I often say that poetry uses the language of dreams: metaphor, irony, simile and symbolism.  The poet is a waking dreamer.  I was exposed to the work of Carl Jung years ago and his ideas about the role the unconscious plays in the creative process made a great impression.  I believe that poetry is born in the unconscious and is filtered through consciousness and stylized by the skills and tools of the poet.  That means that a poem is the product of the total Self (the unconscious and conscious).  I think the same is true not just for poetry, but for art, in all its many forms.  

Much of Doug’s non-Merida poetry is available online at Funky Dog Publishing.

Editor’s Note: In this interview, the part of Yucatan Living (YL) was played by the lovely and peripatetic Martha Lindley, patrona of poets and perros. Thank you, Martha! Thank you, Doug! Thank you, Beryl and Louis and MELL and Amate and John Stevens. Thank you all for the words you put to the music that is life in Merida.

The group now known as AANY began the hard work of finding "undiscovered" three-dimensional artists, nurturing them and organizing them to show their work about two years ago. We wrote about them, we met with them, and we attended the AANY shows (there were two last year). Oh, and we should probably mention that we bought as much art as our pocketbooks would allow too! Our wallets were empty when we walked out of the shows, but our backseats were full and the everyone (artists, organizers and buyers) was happy.

Since then we have kept in touch with Joan Farrell and the others working with her to fine-tune the AANY program.

Lest anyone think this is an easy job, let us disabuse you of that right away. Nothing about the production of these two AANY shows has been simple, because the organizers are setting high standards for themselves and for the artists.

For the artists, they first require that their work is high quality. That it shows thought, care and pride. They also must produce works that demonstrate creativity and original thought. There are a million places to go to see embroidered huipiles done in traditional designs, for instance. Those are beautiful, but they aren’t what AANY is about. The AANY organization is looking for original, unique and creative designs. Using the example of embroidery, take Elena Martinez, a woman who lives here in Merida. At the last AANY show, she had two tables of displays with beautifully embroidered towels, tablecloths, dresses… even a few rocks covered with crocheted "sweaters" (yes, we bought one!). Some of the designs were vaguely traditional, but many were completely original and modern. The materials (linens, cottons, wool) were exquisite and obviously chosen with care. She obviously possesses a well-developed sense of color and composition and it was a pleasure just to view her work, let along bring one home.

Once an artist is identified, the AANY team works closely with them week in and week out to prepare them for the show. They must learn to produce a sufficient amount of work to be shown, something that is sometimes a bit difficult when pieces are intricate and labor-intensive. They must also solve the problems of transportation, one of the biggest problems for most of the artists. So many of them live in small villages, don’t own their own vehicles, and have a hard time finding a way to bring their work safely into Merida. They must decide on a fair price, and they often need to also produce some marketing materials, if only business cards or a flyer.

To add to the complications of the AANY organizers, the artists are all at a different stage of their development in learning to produce and market their work. Still, they are working diligently to create a program that treats artists equally, sets a standard for admission that is fair but accurate, and creates an income stream for both the individual artists and the program as a whole. Someday, the organizers hope to turn the management of the program over to a coalition of the artists themselves, and preparing for this is perhaps their biggest task.

So what kind of art can you expect to see at these shows? Some of the artists who were successful in the last show included Carlos Ordaz Solis from Valladolid, who mounts a variety of orchids on found sticks and logs, Pedro Ayuso Vela who carves designs on the outside of gourds, Jorge Guerra Chan who turns the limbs of native trees into walking and standing animals and people, and Leonardo Paz who transform ordinary rocks into animals. Another favorite of ours is the very talented Montserrat Altes from Izamal, who creates fantastic mobiles out of jicaras and other natural gourds, shells and pods.

WIth any luck, these artists will be at the December show (see details below). And in what is becoming an AANY tradition, there will be new artists as well. In December we are looking forward to seeing tapetes, thin rugs or wall hangings made from local reeds and woven together to form intricate patterns. The tapetes are made by a number of women in Nunkini, a town in Campeche. We have also heard that an artist named Don Primo Uicab will be bringing chairs and confidentiales (?) made from bent willow branches (bejuco)… a nice alternative to factory-made outdoor or casual furniture.

This year, AANY has created an opportunity for those of you who want to help these artists in their quest for self-sufficiency through their work, or who are inveterate shoppers and want to get a head start on everyone else. By purchasing an AANY Sponsorship, you will not only support this effort but you will get some combination of early admission to the upcoming Saturday show, free tickets for refreshments at the show, your name on the Sponsorship Banner and admission to an upcoming special event. In the words of the organizers, "Your donation will fund the show’s direct expenses, print advertising, artist workshops, and research to identify studio artists and artists in small villages. Money from all sales goes directly to the creating artists. AANY directly benefits three-dimensional Yucatecan artists and helps make our international community a part of theirs."

The organizers of AANY spend the time between shows driving all over the Yucatan Peninsula following up leads and searching out artists who are creating from their individual visions. In addition, they have started to organize workshops for the artists. This week, Craig LaBerge, a museum curator from Canada who lives here in Merida, spoke at an artist workshop about how to display art for maximum effect and saleability. For most of the artists, this kind of thing is the only education they have ever received in relation to their art.

If you are interested in buying some of the work of these talented Yucatecans, we encourage you to show up at the AANY Arte A Mano Show on December 5 and 6. The show will be held at the Club de Leones (Lion’s Club) building on Avenida Colon between Calles 14 and 16. The new Yucatan Living Merida Art Map, which will be out on the streets in less than two weeks (and downloadable here) marks the location on the map.

If you would like to be a sponsor, there are three levels:

• $250 pesos buys you early admission on Dec. 5, 1 free hospitality ticket (for drink or food at the event) and your name on the banner.
• $500 pesos buys you early admission, 2 hospitality tickets and your name on the banner.
• $1000 pesos buys you early admission, 4 hospitality tickets, your name on the banner and admission to a special event that will soon be announced.

To sign up to be a sponsor, please contact Ken Scott by calling 285-5442 or email him kenscott740 [at] gmail [dot] com.
Tell him you heard about it on Yucatan Living!

We hope that all of you reading this will turn out for this fabulous event… and we’re saying this completely selfishly! We love shopping at this event for Christmas presents and for beautiful locally-made art for our home. So please come to the Arte a Mano show so there will continue to be one… and so it will grow in size and scope, bringing more beauty and prosperity to all corners of the Yucatan Peninsula.

Editor’s Note: The lovely photos of the Mayan women making tapetes were provided by Anny Schrader who can be reached at anny [at] casamontejo [dot] com.

****

The Next AANY show will be held on March 20-21, 2010 at a new location, Coparmex, on Avenida Hildalgo X 38th, García Ginerés
Saturday, 10 am to 7 pm and Sunday 10 am to 5 pm. For more information, email joanafarrell [at] yahoo [dot] com

The Absence of Sculpture
First of all, remember the sculpture exhibits that used to grace Paseo de Montejo for ten months every year, exhibiting artists from Mexico and another chosen country (Spain, Japan, etc.)? Well, there is not going to be one this year, and there are no plans that we know of to revive that 5-year tradition. There is a new party in power in the state, and they are busy planning and creating their own traditions.

Meeting with the Instituto de Cultura
Which brings us to another important item. Last week, Working Gringa joined about twenty other extranjeros in a special meeting with the Director of the Instituto de Cultura de Yucatan (ICY), the state-run department that is in charge of all artistic and cultural programs in the state. ICY covers everything from the various orchestras and dance companies to the theatres, music programs and workshops on everything from Taekwondo to puppet shows. We met with the director, Renan Alberto Guillermo Gonzalez and about six of his employees, including the head of Publicity, Jose Aviles Marin and the lovely Maricarmen Perez who is a singer at Jazzin’ Merida on Friday nights and who, as an ICY employee, is now the newly anointed Ambassador for ICY to the extranjero community (as a direct result of this meeting).

The meeting was full of expressed gratitude (in both directions) and a few suggestions for improvement. Specifically, we asked for earlier visibility on events so that we can keep our calendar more up to date and get events on the calendar sooner, giving our readers and ourselves time to plan to attend. We feel confident that we will all be benefitting from greater cooperation and visibility in the very near future, and we’re excited about that.

We also took the opportunity to educate the Director and his staff on some of the programs that we gringos are involved in that we feel they should know about. In addition to Working Gringa (who talked about the Yucatan Living website and the Yucatan Living Merida Art Map), representatives from the AANY program, the Merida English Library, the International Women’s Club and the Yucatan Goldbook talked about their projects.
Another program was also presented by Cherie Pitillo and Greenwood, a seemingly indefatigable extranjero couple that have been living here for about two years now. They presented a very thick notebook with photos, captions and explanations about a promising and special art program called Purpura Plastika. This worthy program, run by young Mexican artists, teaches art in local orphanages, and we hope to be writing more about it soon.

Director Hernan told us about ICY’s four main areas of work:

• Promotion of events to the public
• Support of spaces for events to take place
• Preservation of Mayan and Mestizo culture
• Participation of and support of the 106 Yucatan Municipalities, of which Merida is one. Specifically, this refers to the decentralization of cultural activities in an attempt to bring the benefits of culture to all the people of the Yucatan, as well as bringing the income from tourism that may come to participate in and view cultural events.

He specifically mentioned the number of children who are taking music lessons around the state, the various children’s orchestras and the system that is promoting music education called ORJUVE, Sistema Estatal de Orquestas Juveniles de Yucatán (State System of Juvenile Orchestras in Yucatan). He mentioned that each town has been given a representative who is tasked with seeing to it that their town gets the events and support that it wants. A program like this holds wonderful potential and we look forward to seeing what five years of this kind of attention might create in the state of Yucatan, for the children and for the communities as a whole.

New Artists
A walk along the Artists Market on Paseo de Montejo last Sunday (the first in a long time, sad to say…) turned up three new and very exciting artists. We met Agustín, a young man from Jalisco who studied art in Los Angeles, but has come back to Mexico to paint, draw and start an art school specializing in animation. His canvases were stunning, showing an adept hand at figure drawing as well as a good sense of color and, we must admit, we bought one. Then, just down the street a little way, we found Viviana Hinojosa and her novio (boyfriend), both artists. We would have bought another work of art on the spot if A- we hadn’t already bought one up the road and had no money left and B- we hadn’t found out about their upcoming show. Viviana and Miguel will be showing their works at a show coming in June at the new SoHo Galleries, and we plan to be there to make sure we get our pick of their work!

SoHo in Merida
Oh, you haven’t heard yet of Soho Galleries? Well, if you haven’t, you will. Adele, the owner of SoHo, comes from New York City (thus the name). She has brought her big city sensibilities and knowledge of art to Merida and she plans to use it to OUR advantage! She and her significant other, Nicolas Lavroff (a photographer) stock the gallery with new works from local artists, classic prints from a collection they have been growing for years, and they also offer giclee prints of many of the works in the gallery if you can’t afford the real thing. We’re excited about some of the upcoming shows and the energy that Adele is putting into helping Artists in Mexico put on a gallery faire in Santa Ana Park. When we know more about this, you’ll be the first to know.

Gallery Tours, Guided and Self-Guided
Gallery owners are multiplying and getting creative too. Gallería Victoria just announced an art gallery and museum tour for tourists (www.meridagallerytour.com)… a great way to get an introduction to some of the venues for art in our fair city. The tour will be handing out the Summer 2009 edition of the Yucatan Living Merida Art Map, which will be available in about two weeks, chock full of new and old galleries in Merida and all the information you need to enjoy them. The Yucatan Living Merida Art Map is really a self-guided tour of the museums and galleries and other locales where you might encounter art in downtown Merida. A must for any serious art lover who lives or visits here. The art map can be found at the city information kiosks, the Merida English Library, various stores, restaurants, galleries and museums… and you can download it as a .pdf from the Art in Merida listings page as well.

Georgia Charuhas
One of Merida’s favorite artists, Georgia Charuhas , has been working in watercolors lately and seems to be fully enjoying her Blue Period. She was honored this spring to be one of four Mexican women in an exhibition in Mexico City called Artilugios (Artifacts). The show, featuring works by Georgia Charuhas, Philippa Smith, Rocío Caballero and Pilar Bañuelos, was part of the Festival de México in the Centro Historico, celebrating 25 years of art in the Museo de la Secretaría de Hacienda y Credito Publico and the Antiguo Palacio del Arzobispado (that’s a mouthful, isn’t it? Those are two large historic buildings in Mexico City that now house art museums but once housed the tax collector and the archibishop respectively). Georgia is a world-class artist in our midst and we’re thrilled to have her knowledge, talent and energy in Merida.  

More Music
Another side benefit of the meeting with ICY is that Working Gringa sat next to Katalina McNulty. It seems that Katalina regularly wanders the streets of Mérida more than three people put together, searching out what’s new and what’s happening, and she has a special interest in music. She has agreed to become Yucatan Living’s Music Correspondent for keeping our Events listings as full and up-to-date with music events as is humanly possible. Welcome, Katalina!!

Saturday Night
A piece of good news that the meeting with the ICY turned up. Remember those wonderful Saturday nights in downtown Merida, when the streets were closed off and chairs and tables put out and music rang through the air? Well, that wondrous event had mysteriously ended awhile ago, but we were told that it is starting up again as of last weekend. Welcome back, Corazon de Mérida!

Art is in the Air
Before we leave the subject of art for now, we would just like to call your attention to the blooming flamboyanes (flame trees) and their dance partners, the lluvia de oro (rain of gold) trees. Both trees, which are often planted next to each other, are in full and glorious bloom about now (May). You can see them almost anywhere, but a particularly spectacular drive is Avenida Itzaes, from the airport up to Avenida Colon. Red and yellow abound, and the sweet scent of the lluvia de oro is around the most unexpected corners. Love, art and spring are in the air in Merida!