Sherry Chandler

Cincos Maestros Michoacános

Michoacán de Ocampo is one of 32 Mexican states. Its capital is Morelia, where the Kentucky Institute of International Studies bases its Spanish language immersion program. Michoacán was the site of the pre-Columbian Kingdom of the Purhépecha and is known for its pre-Colombian and colonial architecture. Geographically it is dominated by the Sierra Madre del Sur and it is the winter destination of migrating Monarch butterflies.

Cincos Maestros Michoacános is an exhibit of works by Francisco Rodriguez Oñate, Jesús Escalera, Luis Palomares, Filipe Castaneda, and José Luis Soto González. The exhibit has been brought to four Kentucky colleges and universities under the joint sponsorship of KIIS and the Department of Culture of Michoacán. The exhibit was the impetus for New Madrid’s Mexico in the Heartland issue.

This exhibit is currently showing at the University of Kentucky (Tomorrow is the last day unfortunately), so I decided to walk across campus to the Tuska Gallery to take a look. It was a brisk day, nicer for a lunch-hour walk than I would have thought, though the campus was strewn still with debris from the recent storms, and at Maxwell Place, the President’s house, workmen were feeding a downed tree into the chipper, filling the air with the smell of pine.

The works in this exhibit deal with the mythic (as in the Oñate’s “Musica” shown above) and the modern (as in the detail below from José Luis Soto González’s “Memoria del 68,” which has as its subject the violent suppression of a student demonstration in Mexico City). It shows us “peasant” life and the spectacular landscapes and architecture of the region (example below by Luis Palomares).

I am not by any means an art critic but I love the way these paintings use primary colors and abstraction to create work with nearly a visceral emotional power. They make a very sophisticated bow to the primitive, in either subject matter or style.

The work that hit me hardest was Soto’s five-panel painting entitled “11-9-2001,” a work for which I have no example to show you. It depicts the destruction of the World Trade Center from the first spectacular outburst of flames to the search through the rubble for survivors.

After more than six years of exploitation, I thought I had grown a great emotional callus over the spot occupied by the fall of the towers but this series made me feel once again that ice around the heart.

The center panel was the most powerful of all. From the distance, it looked like a series of light and dark vertical stripes with a horizontal wisp of smoke. Moving closer, I realized it was a close-up of the building and the dark stripes were the windows.

Closer still, and I realized that the little smudges of color in the dark stripes were faces, faces at the windows staring out as the smoke began to curl around the building.

This Mexican art has the power to abrade away the calluses that U.S. politics has rubbed on my soul.

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