Mexican artists’ COVID-themed work captured in book by New Canaan residents
NEW CANAAN — When residents Alan and Trudy Goldberg visited Mexico before the pandemic to soak up the warmth and add to their vast collection of folk art, they developed an affinity for the local artists. When COVID-19 hit, cutting off the small villages around Oaxaca, Alan organized a contest for the pandemicthemed 10-inch sculptures.
Alan, known for his midcentury modern architectural background, was impressed enough with the 26 submissions that he received, he compiled a book entitled “Oaxacan Folk Art: Response to COVID-19.” The book includes pictures of the art, tells the stories behind the the artist’s inspiration for their work and gives readers a glimpse of the artistic culture in the hills around Oaxaca in southwestern Mexico. All profits from the book will go to the Oaxacan artists, Alan said.
“Each village has a specialty,” Alan explained to Hearst. Artists work with techniques and materials that are specific to their village, such as clay figurines, wood carvings, paper mache characters and woven rugs.
“You'll never see a carver in a clay village,” Alan said.
For the contest, the artists took different approaches. “That is part of the charm of it.” Some of the works are “light hearted and kind of funny. Some are realistic. Others are really dark,” said Gwen North Reiss, who wrote the text for the book.
”Two really shocked me because they were so incongruous with their other work,” Trudy said.
“Some are really more dire,” so much so “you don't want to have them in your house,” Alan said of the pieces of art that depict uncomfortably true life circumstances. “We don't have them, it's too horrible.”
The couple started collecting folk art in 1962 from various locations around the world including Africa and Japan, but agreed in the 1990’s to “focus on one” and chose folk art from the western coast of Mexico.
“Mexico made sense because it was next door and they're very prolific,” Alan said.
“And it’s warm in the winter,” Trudy added.
Many of the over 1,000 sculptures once displayed around their New Canaan mid-century modern home, designed by Alan, were donated to Mexican Museum in San Francisco. Although the book focuses on Oaxacan art, Alan said his collection “was a little unusual” because they originated from many states and he estimated more than 85 villages.
During the pandemic, the couple was unable to visit the area, “because of the virus and we heard the things were really bad.” He explained that limited that with exposure cut off to the outside tourist trade, artists’ livelihoods were seriously affected.
At first, he established a GoFundMe page and raised $20,000 for the 26 artists, but “that's not really enough,” Alan said. “So we had a competition.”
Some of submissions include the familiar “spiky ball,” which represents COVID-19 under a microscope. On a credenza in the Goldberg’s home stands a wood sculpture by Juventino Melchor Angeles of a doctor stomping on the COVID-19 structure.
Trudy said she particularly likes a sculplure of a colorful mermaid wearing a mask, holding a baby mermaid also masked. The wooden carving was the last piece of artist Colindo Mechor Gomez. He died soon thereafter.
The myths about mermaids are “sort of different from some of our myths,” Trudy explained. They are “about a young girl who loves the water so much that she stayed in it for a long time and then when she went to go home she couldn't anymore.”
One of the sculptures by artist Leticia Garcia, Trudy explained, featured a mask covering a woman’s face with the other side was a skeleton. On one side, there are four scenes of ordinary life on her skirt, and on the side of the skeleton are scenes that show illness and hunger.
One of the artists, Josefina Aguilar Alcantara, became famous when she was only eight years old when Nelson Rockefeller visited her village. Alan said he had heard a story of villagers seeing a “big black car” and “most villagers thought that he was a tax collector.” Many avoided the man. Alcantara stayed behind and he bought every piece of artwork that she had and it “made her world famous,” Alan said.
“She now does her work blind,” Trudy said of the artist who has since lost her eyesight.
Alan said he asked her how she can continue, to which she responded saying that “it’s not the eyes, it’s the hand and the brain.”
The 45-page book was published by the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, an affiliate of the Smithsonian, and is available at Elm Street Books and online https://www.mexicanfolkartbook.com/. The online version of the book, makes it easy to buy work by the artists.
The art was photographed by Judith Haden and the foreword was written by Mexican anthropologist Marta Turok.
The book is available both in English and Spanish editions.