Grand Opening Of Mexican American Cultural Center
Posted by michelle on 15 Sep 2007 at 06:43 pm | Tagged as: art paparazzi, arts organizations
Today was the grand opening for the Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin. Read more about the show in the Chronicle. Just a year after the festivites for the University of Texas’ Blanton Museum of Art, there hasn’t been too much coverage or puffery like the ballons desai before the big blowout for the Alameda Smithsonian and aforementioned Blanton. The latest installation of Young Latino Artists, YLA #12, coincided with the Grand Opening of the MACC today. This year’s show, “Embracing Chaos,” features Gerald Lopez [ Corpus Christi], Jesus de la Rosa [McAllen, TX], Chuy Benitez [Houston], Anna Pilhoefer [El Paso], Lucilla Flores [Austin] and San Antonio’s own Enrique Martinez.
The Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin initiated this annual YLA exhibition to support emvergeoning artists. The YLA show has evolved into a career checkpoint for most young Mexican American artists in Texas. We’ll post a review later this month.
In the meantime, let’s see if this new Mexican American Cultural Center can evade the perpetual drama that seems to be debasing these cultural institutions’ initial intentions.
Hopefully the new MACC will avoid our ‘perpetual drama’, however, from what I remember of the old MACC it was run into the ground because of in-fighting by the board, most likely because of jockeying for control of the lucrative downtown property, so its not like this is an immaculate conception, so to speak. Of course, hopefully things are smoothed over this time.
The old MACC was a sprawling collection of warehouses. There was a hippy in the back corner blowing glass (making bongs?). There was Inside Books, a collective that collected books and donated them to prison libraries. Nushank Theater Collective also put on yearly Christmas productions as well as other occasional performances for and by the community. Now defunct Cinematexas also made use of the space with their sidebar program called Parallax View which screened many amazing political documentaries on everything from Palestine to Situationist comedies. I recall seeing prima donna Miranda July perform there for Cinematexas.
By the end, people were slowly getting kicked out of their spaces, not unlike what seemed to happen at the silos, sort of. A rogue security guard was somehow kept at bay for the occasional guerilla film shoot and other sporadic uses of the space. And then it shut its gates for good. Until now.
The MACC is dead. Long live the MACC.
“Why do I hate Wayne when he upholds the war in Vietnam, yet am unbearably moved by the gesture with which he takes Natalie Wood into his arms at the end of ‘The Searchers?’ ”-Jean-luc Godard
Holy moley, thanks for the backstory! I had no idea there was so much inner turmoil at the MACC. How do they always end up in such imbroglios? I don’t understand, these places consistently start up as institutions that are invested in the local community but they really take a turn for the worst…
It’s the equivalent of a scandalous novela. I’m beginning to think each place could start its own serial soap opera. What are some good titles? How about:
In the Land of Fideo and Fidelity
As the Taco Turns
The Board and The Beautiful
Some of these details I’m sure will be debated. Maybe the hippy was making stained glass and not a bong? Maybe Miranda July just had special needs? Maybe the MACC was put on hiatus so they could get all the Mexican rabble rousers out so they could move forward and focus on ‘normal’ definitions of Mexican culture? Maybe I’m just an old cantakerous colonel with a new experimental hip?
dismissed,
The Colonel
“Action is more generally understood than words. Like Chinese symbolism, it
will mean different things according to its scenic connotation. Listen to a
description of some unfamiliar object — an African wart hog, for example;
then look at a picture of the animal and see how surprised you are (Time
Magazine, February 9, 1931).”-Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin
As a 16-ish cipher roaming Austin while my brother suffered UT orientation, I was impressed with Mexic-Arte and its director Sylvia Orozco but I didn’t relish being categorized as either “Young” or “Latino.” “Artist,” too sounded constricted and yet simultaneously non-specific. These days, honorariums make pigeonholes more nest-like, but there’s ample shit under the surface.
Yes, I understand the historic importance of black and women’s colleges, and the crucial role institutions like Mexic-Arte have played in achieving widespread appreciation and understanding of a culture that had been denigrated since the Mexican-American War. And while it’s true the fine arts world has yet to achieve it’s proverbial “black quarterback,” I’m rolling with The A-Team, so don’t look for me if Murdock, Hannibal, and Mr. T aren’t invited as well.
at this very moment, the foreclosed political is celebrating a triumphant comeback in its most archaic form of pure, undistilled racist hatred of the Other which renders the rational tolerant attitude utterly impotent. In this precise sense, the contemporary “postmodern” racism is the symptom of the multiculturalist late capitalism, bringing to the light the inherent contradiction of the liberal-democratic ideological project. Liberal “tolerance” condones the folklorist Other deprived of its substance (like the multitude of “ethnic cuisines” in a contemporary megalopolis) — any “real” Other is instantly denounced for its “fundamentalism”, since the kernel of Otherness resides in the regulation of its jouissance, i.e. the “real Other” is by definition “patriarchal”, “violent”, never the Other of ethereal wisdom and charming customs. One is tempted to reactualize here the old Marcusean notion of “repressive tolerance”, reconceiving it as the tolerance of the Other in its aseptized, benign form, which forecloses the dimension of the Real of the Other’s jouissance.-Zizek
Hello, I was in the thick of it as all of this came down. I am the curator the show. Here’s a video of the exhibit:
http://www.mexic-artemuseum.org/yla12/yla12video.mp4
I work at Mexic-Arte Museum and have moonlighted at the MACC.
There is, of course, plenty of politicking in these “cultural” spheres.
Probably due to the nature of power in Austin…
I am probably the wrong person to open my mouth . . . so I’ll just state that the Exhibit called “Embracing Chaos” speaks to the situ. thank you for your mention here in this blog!
You’re only here because of your association with a Hollywood star