 Welcome!
We hope you enjoy visiting our on-line museum of Mexican folk art and will come back often to view exhibitions as they grow and change. While at the museum, be sure to visit our Gift Shop and take home a treasure. You are invited to join Los Amigos del Arte Popular and can do so on-line by visiting the Membership Office. All rooms of the museum are open to the public, so enjoy exploring and learning more about us and about Mexican folk art.
Attention Dealers of Mexican Folk Art
If you would like to have postcards advertising Los Amigos & our website for your customers, please visit the contact page and email your request. We will be glad to send you some and will appreciate your assistance in encouraging others to join. Members who are dealers are gladly linked to our site upon request.
Goals & Mission Statement
Our mission is to share our passion for Mexico and its art and to carry out our goals to promote and educate the public about Mexican folk art. Rendezvous and events are a wonderful experience where we meet others with the same passion & learn from each other, attempting to meet all our financial, educational & social goals.
Website Information Gathering
Visitors to our museum store gift shop can be assured that information collected for one purpose is not shared or sold to any third party. Visitors may also be assured that by providing personal information they will not receive unwanted solicitations.
AMIGOS IN THE NEWS
Changing Dreams: A Generation of Oaxaca’s Woodcarvers, Photographs by Vicki Ragan, text by Shepard Barbash, Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, 2007 (New Members)
It is rare when a photographer and a writer are able to collaborate and produce a work that is of a single aesthetic, which is made more powerful by the differences of their tools. Often a book’s strong images and insightful prose remain illustrative, each of the other. There have been exceptions like The American Monument, 1976, with photographs by Lee Friedlander and a text by Leslie George Katz. In Changing Dreams Ragan and Barbash have produced another exception, which contains moving, elegant, photographs by Ragan and an illuminating, expressive narrative by Barbash about the lives, loves, aspirations, and social tragedies of wood carving artists and their families in Oaxaca. These ubiquitous woodcarvings of exotic, fantastical, creatures and imaginary beings in outrageous color and pattern have invaded art galleries and curio shops from New York to Santa Fe since the 1980s.
In time, however, supply overwhelmed demand and the inevitable glut of exported carvings north of the border became more like a cloud of locusts attracted to acres and acres of green sustenance – gringo dollars. But the unabated marketing excess by commercial buyers, eventually led to a complicated story for survival of the carvings and their makers. In the swirl of the collecting mania the carvers’ quest had always been about far more than just financial reward for its own sake. It was about keeping their art alive and their families and homes secure. Most of the carvers initially made a better living when recognition came, but the amount of time and commitment required for making their carvings soon became insupportable for many, especially as competition increased. Most did not want to stop carving, but finding a way to support it and their day-to-day needs required drastic measures that were not without risk.
Barbash makes clear at the beginning of the story that the book is about more than word portraits of the carvers; it is about the human cost of relentless poverty and governmental ineptness upon a whole community of artists: “From their dusty villages in the desert sun to the orchards of Oregon and kitchens of Chicago, the carvers have joined millions of Mexicans who, unable to find good work at home, are pulling their country unevenly toward prosperity by making a space for themselves in the United States. …Once across the border, the carvers seem decidedly less exotic but no less foreign to their new neighbors and employers. …What the high prices [of their carvings] reflect and what this book hopes to convey are the growing aspirations and changing dreams of a people struggling to catch up without leaving too much behind, whose creations we enjoy but whose lives we barely understand even as they move closer to our own.”
Over the past couple of decades Ragan and Barbash have spent several years living in Oaxaca sharing in the lives of the carvers, making friends and documenting all the forces that impact their lives as artists and artisans. What they saw and experienced reveals what happens to the hopes and desires of an entire community in a land devoid of societal constancy, where home and love of place is betrayed by “bilateralism,” where “souls are divided” between being able to live in their beloved Oaxaca and the need to become mojados – unauthorized border crossers into the United States.
Today many of the carvers reluctantly cross the border so that they can earn enough money to provide for minor improvements in their living conditions in spite of entrenched poverty, continuing to carve when they can. Modest prosperity and recognition for the carvings have inspired changes in the community mindset. There is a struggle to keep alive the identity of Oaxaca as an artists’ colony and tourist attraction, which benefits everyone. But there is also the realization that the mojado syndrome is equally responsible for sustaining the future.
Ragan and Barbash have organized the book into stories and images about individuals and families, which brings the reader closer to the human dimension of what they have observed and documented. In one situation after another there is a common theme about carvers giving up their creative aspirations to become an undocumented worker so that a child or relative might not have to follow the same dangerous path.
Ragan is well known for her work, which is included in museums throughout the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Barbash is the former Mexico and Central America Bureau Chief for the Houston Chronicle. During the 1980s they lived in Oaxaca for several years and in 1993 they published their first book about the work of the carvers in Oaxacan Wood Carving: The Magic in the Trees. Now living in North Carolina, they returned in 2004 to assess the state of the community they had grown to love and to allow the passage of time to be the arbiter of their observations. It is here that Ragan’s photographs describe what cannot be imagined from the written word, just as the text describes what cannot be discerned from vision alone.
Ragan’s photographs are presented as diptychs in which portraits of individual carvers and their families are shown in images made fifteen years apart. This approach allows the inherent consequences of time to become the aesthetic underpinning of her vision. Like other photographers who have photographed subjects over time, Ragan’s images surprise the viewer with insight into how lives of her subjects have changed. Children have grown into adults, sometimes with their spirit intact, other times not; young adults carvers marry, have families, and become patron protectors of the carving tradition; other carvers age and return to their farms or other subsistence existences. But Ragan has taken the idea one step further by merging the language of vision with the evocative power of Barbash’s writing, who maintains that Ragan’s photographs anchored the project and the writing came later. This is not merely generous praise by one artist of another. It is apparent that there is an aesthetic symbiosis between the photographs and the writing, which allows the images to open up the text to a palpable sense of the humanity, emotions, and personal experience in meeting each of the carvers on the pages of the book.
In a chapter devoted to the women of Oaxaca the book expands its profile of carvers to note that many women are now carvers themselves where before they had been anonymous painters of the carvings. The ripple effect of this evolution of women’s artistic status is also evident in yet younger women who talk of having careers, education, and independent lives. While opportunities may not match the changing ideals for many of the women, as Barbash points out, at least for now they are beginning to face their future looking forward and not backward, which is an important difference in what was once a strictly prescribed way of life. The photographs of the women are also some of the most elegantly rendered images portraying animated personalities and a connection with the photographer that is unique.
In direct ways the book is an apologia for the very human story behind the mojados and the families left behind. It is about those individuals who have enough imagination to find a way to make life better for themselves and others. And along that pathway Ragan and Barbash documented the moment in time when international immigration law and politics intersected with art and artists. - James Enyeart
"Mexican Popular Art Clothing & Dolls" by Wendy Scalzo is a new Schiffer book which appears on the Schiffer site and on Amazon although not available until after January. Schiffer states, "This insightful study of traditional Mexican clothing is based on authentic dolls made by folk artists in Mexico. With over 550 color photographs, it is a beautiful and comprehensive review that relates customs, language, music, and folk arts to a blending that is wholly Mexican and now its national culture. Men’s and women’s regional clothing is explored, including serapes, sombreros, Colonial dress, skirts, and shawls. Dolls, period photographs, and adult clothes present a visual story tracing variations that clothing has undergone from decade to decade. Today, people in all walks of life will find this refreshing look at traditional Mexican attire to be fascinating and inspiring."
Wendy has donated to Los Amigos a gorgeous cloth doll featured in her book and made mid 20th century. Representing a proud mestiza from Tlaquepaque, Mexico, the doll is approximately 12 inches tall, made of cloth with pressed papier maché face, molded features and hand-painted detail. She is dressed in a traditional long, black enagua full skirt, trimmed at the bottom and wears a white huipil, with a chignon-braided wig. The doll will be available for sale in our on-line gift shop in January. Proceeds from the sale of the doll will help fund future projects. Thanks Wendy and congratulations on your accomplishment.
The book will soon be published by Schiffer books with a list price of $39.95. However, right now, Amazon is selling the book for $26.37 AND the book is elegible for "super saver discount" shipping rates (free shipping) AND since the book is not yet published, an additional discount of 5% or $1.32 is also available. TOTAL would be $25.05. Don't know how long the free shipping will last, and the additional discount will end on publication. Order yours now! Also, Wendy will be available for book signings & presentations. If you are interested in contacting her, let me know and I'll put you in touch.
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