ArtE January 2011

1 arte SPRING 2011 SPRING 2011 arte 4

The McAllen Arts Council is dedicated to supporting and en-couraging the development of a city-wide arts culture and infra-structure that includes all disciplines of the arts. This support and encouragement will improve the city’s quality of life through promoting and enhancing creativity, education and the appre-ciation of the arts. Membership is free to McAllen Chamber of Commerce members and is $25 annually for all others.

OFFICERSEXECUTIVE DIRECTORCHAIRVICE CHAIRTREASURER

COMMITTEESEXECUTIVE COMMITTEEMARKETING COMMITTEEADVOCACY COMMITTEEEDUCATION COMMITTEEFUNDING DEVELPMENTGRANTS COMMITTEE

GREG SCHULLERNANCY MOYERSERENA MEREDITHMONICA FOLK

NANCY MOYERBRONSON DEL RIOREYNALDO SANTIAGOMONICA FOLKSERENA MEREDITHGREG SCHULLER

mcallenartscouncil.com | mcallenarts.com

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SANTA BARRAZASOUTH TEXAS COLLEGE ART GALLERYEDWARD VIDAURREPASTA, POETRY & VINOJAN SEALETEXAS POET LAUREATESARAH WILLIAMS BREAKOUT POETCHRIS JORDANIMASALYSSA GONZALEZSOUTH TEXAS LYRIC OPERAANGEL RODRIGUEZMUSIC AFTER HOURSALBERTO KREIMERMANHERMES MUSIC FOUNDATIONCIVIC CHIC McALLEN ARCHITECTURE

ArtE welcomes proposals for articles that support the mission of the McAllen Arts Council. Inquires should be addressed to [email protected].

During the fall of 2011, McAllen welcomed the inter-nationally known Tejana art-ist, Santa Barraza.

Barraza lectured and host-ed a signing event for her recently published book, “Santa Barraza, Artist of the Borderlands,” edited by Ma-ria Herrera-Sobek. It is avail-able from Texas A&M Univer-sity Press.

She also mounted an im-pressive exhibit of her paint-ings, drawings, and prints,” Four Decades of Chicana Art and Culture in Tejas and Beyond,” at the Library Art Gallery, South Texas College. A participant in the forma-tive years of the Chicano Art movement, this artist was in-vited to share her vision with the McAllen community.

“I use the maguey plant as a symbol of resurrection,” explained Barraza, “Posada has the Virgen of Guadalupe emerging from a Maguey

SANTA BARRAZA

STC EXHIBIT BREATHES MODERN MEANING INTO MEXICO’S MYTHOS

BY NANCY MOYER


LIBRARY.SOUTHTEXASCOLLEGE.EDU/LAG

plant. So I started using it because I saw it in Mexican Art. ”The Mexican connection is a major theme in her art work.

Barraza’s paintings reflected a simplified representational style. She sees this style as a break from the established European art tradition embraced by U.S. art schools. She also rejects standard color theories in favor of the brilliant color sensi-bility found in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The insistence on European aesthetics during her graduate studies at the University of Texas led to her re-jection of that legacy. Ultimately, after visiting Oaxaca, her fascination with Mesoamerican mythology included a different way of seeing color. “I be-gan reclaiming my identity, and de-colonizing myself,” she said.

Her use of the term, “de-colonizing” is significant. “Mexican Americans and Native Americans have been colonized by the Europeans,” she proclaimed. “When the Spaniards came, they colonized us. We lost our language. My heritage is Karankawa and we had an indigenous culture we no longer have. My color palette is the de-colonization of the traditional European color aesthetic.”

Depicting the historical, emotional, and spiritual land between Mexico

and Texas as it relates to her own life, the paintings contained references to ancient, colonial, and modern Mexi-can life woven into contemporary Border events and its people. Self-images and those of her family find their way into her visual continuum. Several of the paintings in the exhibit incorporated “date boxes,” a pre-His-panic method of representing days of the week to indicate an event during that time, although Barraza indicated that their use in her paintings is deco-rative.

Her teacher, Ben Bailey, who trav-eled Mexico and shared his slides of the buildings and the pyramids with his students, inspired her artistic direc-tion and passion. Barraza fell in love with the country through his eyes. Since then, she has traveled into Mex-ico, particularly Oaxaca, many times. Her bachelor and master of fine arts degrees were earned from The Uni-versity of Texas at Austin; she has taught at the Art Institute of Chicago, Penn State University, and currently teaches at Texas A&M–Kingsville.

STC’s Library Art Gallery Program exhibits regional, national and inter-national artwork, explores new vi-sions and theories of creativity, and introduces innovative artistic expres-sions to the South Texas region.


COVER La Llorona ll (detail)PREVIOUS PAGE Mano Ponderosa de Coyolxauhquie OPPOSITE PAGE Nepantla TOP SelenaABOVE Codex of the Cosecha

TELL ME WHO YOU ARE IN 30 SECONDS ... GO.I’m a latch-key kid from East Los Angeles. I’m 38, and I’m a poet moonlighting as a restaurant manager.

POETRY ISN’T JUST SHAKESPEARE SONNETS ANYMORE. WHAT IS IT IN 2012?It’s breaking down walls and marching for a better tomorrow. Poetry will always be a love story and Shakespeare will always flow through the bleeding ink of a poets pen. It’s the greatest story you’ll ever be told, or the most boring conversation you’ll ever hear.

EVERYONE IN McALLEN HAS YOUR FULL ATTENTION. WHAT IS THE ONE THING THEY SHOULD REALIZE?That the arts is a culture that can and should be embraced by all, young and old. Carino’s Italian in

McAllen has it once a month and it’s become more than just dinner, It’s become a dining experience that is unique and worth getting out to.

WHAT’S THE MOST POETICALLY NAMED DISH AT CARINO’S? Our homemade lasagna, it’s a 16-layered haiku.

DESCRIBE THE VALLEY ... POETICALLY, OF COURSE.El Vallewood-framedraspa stands and taqueriasFreddy Fendery Ramon Ayalatrain stopsand decrepit small towns from San Benito to PeñitasI left my lovefor muralsof the Virgin Maryfor the sound of cicadasand a girl with almond shaped eyes.

EDWARDVIDAURRE

THE BARRIO

POETEdward Vidaurre (a.k.a.

The Barrio Poet) is a former “latch-key kid”

from East L.A. is bringing poetry to a broader

audience through “Pasta, Poetry & Vino,” a monthly event he started at Johnny

Carino’s in North McAllen where amateur poets and the public gather to read,

listen, wine and dine.

FACEBOOK.COM/EDWARD.VIDAURRE

PASTA,POETRY& VINOA night of poetry, music, art and great Italian cuisine.

WHY GO? To support a local non-profit that always benefits from the event. To meet new people and share in the community of local artists. It has grown more than just an event of poetry, you can come support local music talents and visual artists as well.

WHEN? Usually the 2nd or 3rd Friday of the month. January 13, 2012, kicks off the new year “Pasta, Poetry and Vino Nove”

WHERE? Carino’s Italian, 421 E. Nolana Loop, McAllen, Texas

CALL? 956-631-6400


Each year, the Texas Legislature names one Lone Star writers as its Poet Laureate. The designation for 2012 was bestowed upon McAl-len’s own Jan Epton Seale.“It’s a great privilege, and a re-

sponsibility, I feel,” Seale told The Monitor newspaper. Seale’s work is well known

among literary circles. With six published collections of poetry un-der her belt, the distinction of Poet Laureate is a richly deserved mile-stone in her long career.

The paper lay hidden,Read and tossed into obscurity.Its title poignant but,Its words voicing impurity;“We cannot publish this,” they say.“Nor have it read or on displaySusceptible teens or childrenNeed not hear or see life, as you portray.”But love, anger, hate and fear?Words are only words without a voice;Without interpretation, words lack meaning.Only if the word is understood,Will young ears know, I’m screaming.Screaming because of violence;Screaming because of your silence;The way I love, because you hate;It’s you I fear, because you rate;Rigid skin color, Gods, and angry mates;You no longer honoring our rights;Our national dysfunction; tells of our plights,Warns of our fates!

Once Sarah E. Williams sets her sights on something, she usually finds a way to get it. The McAl-len resident didn’t let age or be-ing bound to a wheelchair stop her from becoming one of the area’s most unforgettable new voices. Just a year or so after writing her first poem, Williams is now a published writer who’s shown no fear in her writing about tough topics like sex-uality and social inequality.

WORDS WITHOUT A VOICE

SARAH E. WILLIAMS

THEPOEMSOFSARAH.BLOGSPOT.COM

JANSEALE.COM

FROM ‘HOW THE GRANDMOTHER OF THE WORLD WILL ENTERTAIN HERSELF’

“At the last, the Grandmother of the World

will stoop, open the bottom drawer,

shake off thumbtacks and bread wrapper ties,

retrieve the ball. She’ll rise slowly—

the Ages make for arthritis—and begin to unwind,

rearranging the bird paths to Her liking:”

THE POET

LAUREATE


chris jordanAT IMAS,BEAUTYbearS a warning

Chris Jordan brought astonish-ment and social conscience to IMAS viewers

this fall with his remarkable ex-hibition, “Running the Numbers.” A well-attended dialogue session at the exhibit site between Jordan

and IMAS Director, Joseph Bravo, initiated this amazing exhibit. A talk followed on Saturday allowing Jordan more time to elaborate on his work of locating and making consumer waste understandable.

WWW.IMASONLINE.ORG


13 arte SPRING 2011 SPRING 2011 arte 14 A lawyer by profession, Chris Jordan

began driving around his own Seattle/Tacoma area and photographing plac-es where “color would appear inad-vertently.” He often found interesting color patterns at garbage sites. Stand-ing in front of these massive piles of garbage and piles of broken glass and steel, old shredded cars and so on, he began to learn that he was only seeing a tiny piece of our waste.

“There was this football field-sized pile of crushed, shredded cars,” he said emphatically, “and as I was there photographing it, the guy who was in charge of the yard told me, ‘Oh Yeah, that’ll all be gone next week and we’ll have a new pile.’ They were just be-ginning to load 130,000 tons of steel shred onto a ship, and that was just one of many car shredding places; that was just in the area I live in.”

This led him to create “Running the Numbers,” which has been displayed at over twenty museums nationwide in the last four years.

Jordan has received national rec-ognition on shows like The Colbert Report, Bill Moyers Journal and web-sensation, Ted.com.

Through digital photography, Jor-dan creates large-scale collages of mass quantities of containers, toys, cell phones and numerous other objects that Americans consume and discard on a daily, and sometimes even hour-

ly, basis. Examples like “Light Bulbs, 2008” which depicts 320,000 light bulbs (equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the Unit-ed States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage) brings to life the cumulative effects of American consumption, something that Jordan says is “invisible to us”.

Jordan’s work seduces and then in-forms the viewer. His method is labor intensive.

Taking thousands of small photo-graphs, Jordan uses them to produce comprehensible images that shock the viewer with the reality of our wasteful consumption. Each work is a visual representation of an incomprehensible reality that has greater impact than its numerical data.

To provide visual interest, he forms a pleasant image from the discarded waste to pique the viewer’s interest. For instance, “Toothpicks” depicts 100 million toothpicks equal to the number of trees cut yearly in the US to make the paper for junk mail. It is presented in the form of a pleasant landscape.

“We are in denial,” asserted Jordan. “We distance ourselves from nature and the world we live in. I think to fully live means we have to face the horrors of our mass consumption. And even if someone wants to face these difficult is-sues, it’s not easy to do because there’s nowhere you can go and see them. “

PREVIOUS PAGE Skull With Cigarette

TOP Paper Bags

ABOVE Steel Shreds

------ SHRIMP ------SKILLETINI

5$ OFFAT CARINO’S

MCALLEN: 421 E Nolana Loop • 956.631.6400PHARR: 601 S Jackson Rd • 956.283.1742

1/2 OFF appetizers$2 Beer & Wine Specials

$3 Bellinis & Italian Margaritas

HAPPY HOURMON-FRI FROM 3-7PM

FOOD IS AT THE HEART OF THIS MISSION

OUR PASSIONIN EVERY DISH

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She’s only 17, but Alyssa Joy Gonzalez has had her

sights set on the stage since she was just a little girl.

Though she has been singing all her life, Alyssa recently

found her greatest passion: the opera. She has starred in two of the South Texas Lyric Opera’s most recent productions and aims to

continue her new career at an Ivy League college, where

she’ll study medicine.

WHAT WAS YOUR VERY FIRST IMPRESSION OF OPERA, BEFORE YOU STARTED PERFORMING IN ONE? Before I started singing Opera, every time I heard the word “OPERA” I would picture a large woman in a Viking hat with horns and braids. I thought it was something for “the elite society”. Honestly I was embarrassed to tell my friends that I sang Opera for fear that they would make fun of me. But once I saw how powerful and beautiful my voice sounded, I was less reluctant and actually proud to share my talent. Their reaction was amazing, not only did they sit there in awe of my voice, but they genuinely thought it was “cool!” They had never heard anything like that before, especially from someone my age.

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING A POP SINGER AND AN OPERA SINGER? The difference is HUGE! Everyone wants to be a pop singer and basically they can. Yes, musical talent is needed, but with auto tune and mixing

of music, almost anyone can produce a pop song. There’s a machine to fix any flaw so technique is not as important as your “sex appeal”. As an Opera singer, you are the machine. Your voice is heard in its raw form, so it is all about technique. There is no machine to correct the imperfections. Singing opera is like running a marathon. You need training, you need endurance, you need courage and you better well have the strength to get through it.

WHAT’S ONE THING YOU’D TELL SOMEONE IN THE AUDIENCE WHO HAD NEVER SEEN AN OPERA BEFORE?Open up your mind, listen with your heart, and don’t be intimated by the foreign language. Let the magic of the music speak to you. If you truly surrender your senses, the story will unfold in the beautiful blending of vocals and orchestra. Let the story take you on a journey of passion, lust, betrayal, deception, murder, and love….ahhh the beauty of Opera!

SOUTHTEXASLYRICOPERA.COM

THENEW

STAR


Angel Rodriguez is one of the Rio Grande Valley

rock scene’s biggest allies. He has helped dozens of

young bands find their footing on stage as director

of the McAllen Chamber of Commerce’s ‘Music

After Hours’ program. He produces an online video

series about local artists, and runs his own studio, Sunfish

Records. And in his spare time, he writes and records

his own music under the moniker Something Solar.

SO, WHAT IS MUSIC AFTER HOURS?Music After Hours is a monthly outdoor concert series that I help organize with the McAllen Chamber of Commerce. The goal is to promote local, talented musicians and giving them a proper venue and stage to perform their original music. Music After Hours is held the first Friday of every month during Art Walk at Archer Park, on the corner of Main Street and Business 83 in McAllen.

I’VE NEVER HEARD OF THESE LOCAL BANDS. WHY SHOULD I GO?The answer is in the question: Everyone needs to check out something new, and what better excuse than being able to do something fresh for free? The reason you should go to these bands is literally because you’ve never heard of them, and hopefully after you’ve gone you’ll want to hear them again.

YOU DO ALL SORTS OF STUFF FOR LOCAL ARTISTS. WHAT COULD McALLENITES DO TO HELP OUT ITS ARTISTIC COMMUNITY?Support it. Truly support it. Buy local artists’ work, promote

them. Start looking to the bigger cities for inspiration, not escapism.

WHAT INGREDIENT DOES McALLEN NEED TO BECOME A LIVE MUSIC CITY, LIKE AUSTIN?In my opinion, unity. There’s not enough of it. Anyone new is considered a stranger, and strangers often do not get hired, which in turn limits a lot of growth in the musicality and eccentricities that the music scene could be providing.

WHAT’S ONE GREAT ADVANTAGE LOCAL MUSICIANS HAVE IN THE VALLEY?It’s still so new here, no one has any expectations, so that means it’s completely up to the artists to shape the Valley’s terrain. We have a rare opportunity to start from scratch, a clean slate. And though it may feel at times to be much more difficult than a tried-and-true method, there is a lot of freedom in building from the ground up. The best thing about a place that doesn’t have much of a music scene is that whatever you do is going to have an impact --- whatever you try will matter.

7 P.M. FRIDAY, JAN. 6ARCHER PARK,BUS. 83 & MAINMcALLEN, TEXAS

ALYTADROS

SUNFISHRECORDS.COM

MANOF

THE HOUR



Alberto Kreimerman and some friends were playing music for sick children at a hospital in San Antonio recently when he noticed aforlorn young girl staring off into the distance.

A nurse told him that she couldn’t hear the music --- that she was deaf. Kreimer-man approached the young girl and placed her hand on his guitar. As he began to play, she felt the harmoni-ous vibrations in her finger-tips, and her face lit up with a smile --- for the first time in her life, she experienced music.

Kreimerman has had many moments like this

since he started the non-profit Hermes Music Foun-dation a few years ago, but every time his organization can help even just one child, he considers it a victory.

“Music is healing. If we don’t take care of other people, it becomes a cancer of society.”

The foundation grew out of the music store Kreimer-man has operated in down-town McAllen since the late 1980s. After Hermes Mu-sic became one of North America’s leading sound and lighting equipment distributors, Kreimerman was able to focus his atten-tion on the foundation and

McALLEN PHILANTHROPIST SHOWS HOW MUSIC CAN HEAL THE WORLD

BY NANCY MOYER

KREIMERMANALBERTO its charitable pursuits.

The foundation has given away hundreds of thousands of toys, plus food and medicine, to thousands of children and indigenous communi-ties.

Kreimerman also procudes and hosts a local TV show, Because We Love Music, that showcases national and international artists. The show can be seen on Telemundo (channel 40, cable channel 2 at 9 a.m. on Sun-days, and on Fox channel 17, cable channel 6 at noon on Saturdays). The program won Kreimerman and its

director Juan Alvardo a presti-gious Lone Star Emmy, which was presented to them in November 2011. The show has also won two Lone Star Emmys in the past.

The foundation was also be-hind “Project of Love,” an origi-nal CD that raised money for charity which featured some of popular music’s biggest artists, including Willie Nelson, San-tana, Del Castillo and many others.

The foundation’s high-profile projects are just the beginning,

Kreimerman said. But the re-wards aren’t his --- the children

are the ones who benefit most.“Every child makes a difference,”

he said.FUNDACIONHERMESMUSIC.ORG


CIVIC

It’s impossible to miss the McAllen Public Library’s new Main Building on

Nolana and 23rd Street.

A former Wal-Mart, the structure is an arresting mix of opposites: concrete and glass, futuristic and ageless.

The simple geometry of modern architecture contin-ues to define the look and feel of McAllen’s most famil-iar edifices, and thereby the city itself.

From the mid-century mod-ern of the McAllen Civic Center to the stark Brutalist beauty of the Neuhaus Tow-er, here’s a quick tour of the the city’s most auspicious yet oft-overlooked public art.

CHIC


ABOVE Old McAllen Library Main Building (601 North Main Street) circa 1949 and BELOW circa 2011

ABOVE McAllen Tourist Center (1300 South 10th Street) BELOW McAllen High School (2021 La Vista Avenue)

ABOVE Bentsen Tower (1701 W US Highway 83 ) BELOW McAllen Civic Center (1300 South 10th Street)

ABOVE First Christian Church, 1400 North 10th Street

ABOVE BBVA Compass Tower, 900 North 10th Street

RIGHT Neuhaus Tower, 200 South 10th Street

ABOVE McAllen Convention Center, 700 Convention Center Boulevard


ARCHIVE PHOTOS COURTESY OF McALLEN

HERITAGE CENTER

ArtE January 2011

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Transcript of ArtE January 2011