Review: Arte Diseño Xicágo II at the National Museum of Mexican Art Displays the Work of 19th and 21st Century Artists

Pilsen’s National Museum of Mexican Art presents Arte Diseño Xicágo II (Art Design Chicago), curated by Cesáreo Moreno. The exhibition shares works by Mexican artists who were featured at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, including noted landscape painter José María Velasco, as well as those from concurrent Gilded Age creators and local artists working today.

In 1851, the first industrialized World’s Fair was held in London. The premiere World’s Fair in the States was held in 1853, followed by 1876’s centennial celebration in Philadelphia. New Orleans hosted the 1884 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial, and Paris celebrated the building of the Eiffel Tower with a world-class event in 1889. Over 20 years after the Great Fire, the 1893 Columbian Exposition highlighted Chicago’s (and the United States’) innovation and work ethic, which held similar goals to Mexico’s dictatorial Porfiriato regime: to showcase American cultural history and industrialization aspirations. Global flexing festivals-cum-cultural marketing moments had become a regular occurrence as the world grew smaller. But were they the promised societal melting pots or just platforms for colonialism and marginalization?

At the time, Chicago journalist Ida B. Wells published “The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition” to note the lack of non-white representation at the Columbian Expo. This succinct exhibit also strives to highlight what “outsider artist” output was included and to consider the hypocrisy of why “the US constructed a racial hierarchy to measure the course of ‘racial progress.’”

“These attitudes flourished as the country moved closer to its perceived Columbian destiny of colonizing and empire-building during the Spanish-American War in 1898,” a sign notes.

Mexico’s history during this tumultuous period is shared in the comprehensive signage (in both English and Spanish) throughout the exhibit, among the paintings and other artifacts. Much is explained about Porfirio Diaz and his Científicos, who were more dreamers than the scientists the name implies because they believed in social Darwinism and other cruel governance modes. “In a contradictory way, the ruling class proudly referenced ancient pre-Cuauhtémoc  civilization, yet belittled their living descendants…like campesinos (farm workers)” notes one of the signs, surrounded by large paintings of these “noble natives” or mestizos, mixed indigenous and Spanish people.

The show’s contemporary section features Héctor Duarte’s 2004 glass and ceramic mosaic mural called Ice-Cream Dream, created for the Pink Line’s Western Avenue CTA stop. There’s also a wall of Javier Chavira’s energetic and lush wax-on-wood collage panels, titled Merz 2.

Women’s work is also explored in this show. The Expo’s “Woman’s Building” was designed by Sophia G. Hayden, who was born in Chile, and graduated from MIT as an architect in 1890. The ornamentation and decoration of the Italian Renaissance-style building were also created by American women. Alongside this historical female representation, contemporary Chicago artist Georgina Valverde offers a collection of miniature embroidered cloth objects from her series Talismanic Bundles.

Valverde was inspired to explore these forms after a talk she gave at the Art Institute 20 years ago on a Western African talismanic textile (currently, she gives English- and Spanish-language tours there). Based on the piece’s amulets, which contain sacred writing encased in small animal hide and felt packets, she began making miniature fabric sculptural forms using needle and thread. “I’m drawn to the intensity, delicacy and mystery,” she said. “I find the elements hypnotic and I’m compelled by the idea that the textile and the bundles are charged with protective and healing power.”

She celebrates two-dimensional art “bumping up” into three dimensions, with objects such as worry dolls and other culturally specific items, which can provide “a road map to meditation.” Her work honors the home-confined women who were her forebears, including her mother, her abuelas and beyond. “In the attempt to communicate with ancestors through my work, I ended up communicating with an unconscious part of me,” Valverde said.

Valverde also appreciates the detailed labor involved in textile work, the feminine craft making of embroidery, sewing and crochet, to “return to the work of the hand” that was paramount before the Industrial Revolution. Valverde considers her materials “charged” because she uses old clothes from herself and her husband in her bundles, including underwear, pantyhose and a slip, such as the center of an artificial flower, melted plastic bits, and a single earring that has lost its mate. These works give voice to non-human entities, she says, and help viewers experience the familiar material world in a new way via these juxtapositions.

Her pieces are also charged by the amount of time they’ve existed, she says. They are a playful way to catalog or classify people’s totems. She uses needles as a sculptural tool to form her bundles. “I have an impulse to stab with a needle,” Valverde shared.

In concert, the two collections, mounted in vitrine cases, look hard from a distance, like a collection of stones and shells, despite being formed from mostly soft goods. They also appear to hover like plant spores or notes on sheet music considering flowing out of frame. One array is titled Tender Buttons, after Gertrude Stein’s 1914 prose poetry publication of the same name, which describes mundane everyday objects with experimental diction, including objects, food and rooms. The second piece, A Substance in a Cushion, is named after a poem in the book’s “Objects” section.

In order to mount these small, delicate specimens into a presentation box, Valverde taught herself how to solder the brass claws on the back of the work (laypeople can learn how at the Chicago Industrial Arts & Design Center). Each of her fetishes float in the display case, much like the intricate Chinese jade items at the Art Institute, in butterfly collections for lepidopterists, and many of the artifacts at the 1893 Columbian Expo.

Regarding female artists of the Gilded Age, Valverde notes that embroidery patterns would have been widely available in women’s magazines of the time. “Those would reinforce ideas of women’s virtues and help keep the ‘angel in the house,' employed in gender-appropriate pursuits,” she said. “This is often the backdrop of my work since I inherited my crafty impulses from my grandmother, who in turn learned those skills from her Victorian-era mother.”

“Surprisingly, my great-grandmother, who could wield a rifle as confidently as a needle, seems to have had more agency and independence than my grandmother or mother,” Valverde continued. “So this type of ‘ladies’ work’ is both a sign of achievement and a conflict.” She calls her pieces sculpture to “take it out of the oppressive context of ‘women’s work.’ Putting them into a vitrine, calling them specimens, is another way to dislocate embroidery.”

Valverde concluded, “I find agency and rehabilitation in performing the slow work of the hand on the fast products of the post-industrial age.”

The artists of Mexico and Chicago are linked not only through location but also through a rich history of cross-pollination throughout the centuries. This Art Design Chicago exhibit memorializes this marriage of country and culture as the world moved toward industry.

“Arte Diseño Xicágo II: From the World’s Fair to the Present Day” runs through August 11 at the National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St. in Pilsen, open Tuesdays-Sundays, 10am-5pm.

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