Street Art studio visit

Emilio Zapata. 

Many of the members do work of his image, as he was a highly regarded figure during the Mexican Revolution.

So, on my last full day in Oaxaca we (Pearl, Nicole, Irma, Helen, Patricia [newly graduated Rice U. student I had met recently at an art opening in Oaxaca] and I) were able to visit (through the help of Stephanie Wood) the "studio" of a street art collective named ASAR-O (Assembly of Revolutionary Artists of Oaxaca).  We met Mario (one of the founders), who showed us much of the artwork of members and his own. A special thanks to Irma for helping translate our questions!

Mario and several prints.

It was important for me and Nicole especially to get this visit, since Nicole and I are doing a collaborative lesson on Oaxacan street art as part of our NEH grant fulfillment. And, let's be honest, Nicole was in absolute heaven as a printmaker herself! :-)  I won't bore those of you who aren't into art with tons of info. here, so you can click here, or here, or even here. The last link is to a bilingual interview of ASAR-O members at a Houston radio station (they had an exhibit at a gallery in Houston back in 2008, unfortunately I didn't know of them then!).  The artworks above and below are prints, except where noted. Printmaking definition for those who don't know what I am talking about when I mean "print".

Most of the artworks are political 

(the poster on the left is about the recent elections in Mexico and Oaxaca state, the one on the right is more obviously about oil).

Some of the members acrylic paintings.

The group is currently inactive, but also used to create art in the streets of Oaxaca as forms of protest, using paint and/or stencils as seen below.

Red bugs, black pots

So the last week was for seeing everyone's teaching presentation, but on Thursday Aug. 5 we had a free day. So, Pearl, Stephanie W. (our intrepid director), Debbie, Elise, Lynn, Stef and I went to the cochineal farm then to San Bartolo Coyotepec for some famous black pottery.

I have mentioned cochineals here before, but it was cool to see how they are farmed for production. Funny, on the website link I just posted here, you can buy 25 grams of the dead, dried cochineal bugs to make dye for the equivalent of $8.50 USD... I bought 25 grams of them at the farm for 75 pesos (= $5.88 USD, I should note at the time of these blog postings the exchange rate was $1 USD = $12.75 Mexican Pesos). Anyhoo...

    Showing us how they fill the little woven nests with eggs. The nests are hung on the nopal pads, and are left there until they hatch. (See below). 

Once they hatch, the bugs infect the cactus. The dye produced by these little bugs (females only, the boy bugs "do the deed" and die usually within 7 days of hatching) has been such a hot commodity that the Mixtec people worked out these farming techniques approx. 950 - 1521 CE/AD.

Once they are firmly infested in the nopal pads, the pads are removed and placed in sand in neat rows where each bin is labeled and dated. Dating is important, since the bugs can't be harvested for dye until they are three months old. They are hand-picked or hand-brushed off... it is for this reason that the "spineless" nopal cactus was produced through careful cultivation over the years. 

Close up of the females (the large-ish oval shapes with the lines, they remind me of fat pill bugs). They produce a protective cottony like substance (the white stuff). Drawing of them here.






Close up of the males (see the wings, antennae and "tails"?!... They are MUCH smaller than the females, and we were very lucky to get shots of them since they don't live very long). 


The cochineal produces a gorgeous red color, but when mixed with various acids or bases can make other colors too (i.e. mix with lime juice and it turns orange, add baking soda and it turns purple). I bought some of the dead dried bugs to use in my classroom to teach my students about natural dyes.

In the beginning, it was produced almost exclusively in Oaxaca by indigenous producers, and cochineal became Mexico's second most valued export after silver. Soon after the Spanish conquest (~1500s), it began to be exported to Spain, and by the 17th C. was traded as far away as India. They tried to export the bugs for production in other countries (and other Spanish colonies), but soon realized that 1) the temperature/ humidity wasn't right and 2) the bugs only want the nopal cactus, so if the cactus didn't grow there, neither did the bugs (the only other place that was similar enough to produce the cactus and the bugs was the mountainous areas of Peru... though I just found in my research, that you can get it to grow in Texas too). It was so highly prized that it's price was regularly quoted on the London and Amsterdam Commodities Exchanges. However, the production and demand of cochineal fell sharply with the introduction of synthetic red dyes in the mid-19th C. It came back into demand when those particular synthetic red dyes were found to be cancer-causing (red M&Ms anyone?). OK, enough history lesson! More here if interested. Oh, and BTW, there's probably cochineal (labeled sometimes as cochineal extract, carmine or carminic extract) in some of your foods/drinks and lipstick...

Then we went and had lunch at a roadside restaurant where Stef had seen the roasting chickens, and it was a *great* choice, amazing roasted chicken with rice, pasta salad and warm tortillas. YUM! All with a drink for a whopping 35 pesos (= $2.75 USD). Gonna miss those prices!

Through a suggestion by fellow NEHer Nicole, we then went to Doña Sofia Reyes' black pottery workshop instead of one of the more touristy places (usually these workshops, whether for pottery, textiles or other arts, are the home of the producer with a workshop and/or small store area).

THE Doña Sofia Reyes. She's a very spry 91 years young, she says because of her "manos duros" (strong hands from making pottery for so many years and still to this day). BTW, Doña is a term of respect meaning Madame or Lady.

Once the pot has been made and dried a few days to "leather hard", it is then when Doña Sofia's daughter carves the cut-outs and impresses various textures. The clay starts out brown as you see here, it is a special local clay.

After the designs and cut-outs, Doña Sofia's granddaughter burnishes (rubs) the pots all over with a piece of quartz (or sometimes a smooth river stone) to give it shine. Only after all that, is the pottery fired in a big pit with all the other pieces that are ready (sometimes you have to wait weeks to have a firing so that you have enough pieces to fire). It is during the firing process where the pots turn black from lack of oxygen. The pots are then ready to sell!

 

Doña wasn't very good about taking pictures, but I wanted to give you a size comparison(I'm ~5' 8" and stooping alittle). So many lovely geriatric Oaxacan woman are little!

EB Garden Part 2 (more pics!)

Cool cactus! 

As a bit of an aside, there is a cochineal farm here that I may go see. Cochineal is a small insect that, when crushed, produces a brilliant red dye (and, no it's not blood!). Cochineal live on cactus, and have been used as a natural dye for centuries. You can still find cochineal dye/ extract in many, many things, including the Italian liquor Campinari, Minute Maid Red Grapefruit Juice (no joke, Diego showed us the actual package) and in textiles.

Showing how soapberry tree nuts (fruits?) work.

Love the roots (and that red color!)

Little birdie says "Yummy dragonfruit!"

Frangipani.

Organ cactus fences.

Another view of part of the garden & Sto. Dmgo.

Ethnobotanical Garden Part 1 (lots of pics!)

Pearl and I took the guided tour on Sat. July 24. It was very interesting, and I tried to take alot of notes for mom (they don't have a brochure or anything)! Most all the plants and trees in the garden are used/ were used by the people for one thing or another (medicine, food, washing etc.), hence the term ethnobotanical (1. The plant lore and agricultural customs of a people. 2. The study of such lore and customs.)

The garden was started in 1998, and is a work in progress collecting endemic flora from all over Oaxaca state. These rocks are naturally colored (copper, iron etc.), some rocks were half red, half yellow!

The foods part of the garden (that's Santo Domingo - former convent - in the background).

Kapok (a.k.a. Pachote) tree trunk. Ouch!

Biznaga cactus (with guide Diego for a size comparison). Biznaga are endangered because their flesh is sweet to eat. This particular one is over 1000 years old and weighs approx. 5 tons.

Colorine tree, the fruit is very poisonous (to touch, eat, whatever... there seemed to be lots of toxic plants in the EB Garden!)

Copal tree. Notice the greenish wood (one limb has been pruned on the far left)

 and how the bark sheds.

Part of the filtration system. Rain fails on these rocks and through the cracks to the giant cistern underground. They can collect 1.3 MILLION liters on water in 2 weeks.

A type of maguey (agave).

The pre-cursor to today's corn, each pod/ little ear is a single row of seeds/kernels, you can see the silks sticking out of the pods... Through careful cultivation, people ended up with what we today call corn (and all the varieties thereof).

Octotlan market and some art...

Not much too do this weekend, except work on my lesson plans and Powerpoint etc for a brief presentation on Monday. Though I did get a manicure and pedicure yesterday, and the girls were so enamored with the metallic "spring green" nail polish I brought with me, I left it as a gift for them!

However, went to Octotlan market last Saturday (and had started a post, but never finished nor published it, so here it is below) with Jake, Zak, Pearl, Pam, Kim, Stef, Ron and his wife. Markets are always lots of fun, plenty to see... 

Big markets like this one are very similar to a big box store in the States, you can get just about anything you want or could dream of, all in the open air.

                              

Hands full of shopping bags? No worries, just head carry it so that you can use your hands to carry more things!

Those are bees on the sweet bread, not flies.

                    

Pig head anyone?

Old lady selling herbs. And you better believe she wanted to be paid for her photo, which was one thing I did NOT like about that particular market. Most people expected to be paid at Octotlan, even one lady, who the only photo I took was of her flowers (above), NOT of her. *sigh*

After a couple hours of that, the others went back to Oaxaca, while Jake, Pearl, Zak and I stayed on to visit Josefina Aguilar, who is very well known for her clay figures. 

  

After lunch we headed back and stopped at San Martin Tilcajete, a small town known for it's alebrijes. I bought a beautiful hummingbird from Efrain and Silvia Fuentes. I can't wait to hang it from the ceiling.