Ella Does Squamish

Francisco Toledo, a Zapotec, was born in 1940 in the Oaxaca region of Mexico. He studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Oaxaca and the Centro Superior de Artes Aplicadas del Instituto de Bellas Artes, Mexico. In 1960 he moved to Paris from where he travelled through Europe. In 1965 when he returned to Mexico he started to promote and protect the arts and crafts in Oaxaca.

Toledo’s art is imbued with his Mexican heritage of history and mythology. He has exhibited in many galleries in Mexico, Europe, South and North America and Asia. He is represented in public and private collections worldwide.

"Toledo’s work is a seamless meshing of global and local culture and high art. Dream images from his childhood are fused with pre-Colombian symbolism and myriad references to the work of Dubuffet, Miro, Tapies, Klee, Tamayo, Blake, Goya, Ensor and Durer, among other artists, and also to the writing of figures like Kafka and Borges. Snakes and turtles abound, as do rabbits and coyotes, bats and toads, crickets and dogs, as well as human figures from Mexican history, cycling from one work to another in a dizzying bestiary that is part ancient codex, part intensely modern graffiti. Toledo’s work is based in part on the largely misunderstood shamanistic notion of the nagual, the belief that each human’s fate is intertwined with that of an Aztec spirit in animal form."
Christian Viveros-Faune

For more than twenty years Toledo has been concerned with the well-being of the Oaxacan community and has devoted much of his wealth to this purpose. He is an untiring promoter, sponsor and disseminator of the cultural values of his native state, turning its main town into a dynamic centre for the visual arts and literature. He has created children’s libraries in Indian communities, and has founded a number of important artistic and cultural institutions: the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Oaxaca, the Graphic Arts Institute of Oaxaca (which holds some 100,000 books on art and architecture), the Jorge Luis Borges Library for the Blind (which Toledo created, he says, after watching a group of blind folk visit a nearby art museum), the Centro Fotografico Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Ediciones Toledo (a printing house, which most recently published translations of the poets John Ashbery and Seamus Heaney), and the Centro Cultural Santo Domingo (botanical garden, art restoration centre and library).

In 1993 Toledo was instrumental in founding Pro-OAX (the Endorsement for the Defense and Conservation of the Cultural and National Heritage of Oaxaca) dedicated to the protection and promotion of art, culture and the built and natural environment of Oaxaca. Through Pro-OAX Toledo has led efforts to protect the architectural and cultural heritage of Oaxaca’s city centre. By turning his own private aesthetic activism into a groundswell of popular civic awareness, he has prevented the construction of luxury hotels, four-lane road expansions and asphalt parking lots. He is also credited with stopping the construction of a cable car to the sacred Monte Alban, and preventing the establishment of a McDonald’s outlet in the town’s main square. Far from preventing Oaxaca’s development, through this activism the town has been transformed into one of Mexico’s major cultural, artistic and political hubs.

go to http://www.franciscotoledo.net/

to view some of his work.

Rudolfo Morales

Rudolfo Morales, 1925-2001, was also a Zapotec and a protege of Tamayo. This article by Stan Gotlieb at http://www.mexconnect.com/lettersfrommexico/morales/sgrmorales.html

gives a brief biography -

In the seven years that I have lived in Oaxaca, I have often caught glimpses of the Maestro working in his studio; run into him at various cultural functions; and crossed his path on the street. His life and his works have had an affect on my life here, far greater than our nodding acquaintance would suggest (he probably didn’t even know my name). For me, and a great many others, Morales embodied not only Oaxacan culture, but Oaxacan civility and civic responsibility as well.

A Zapotec, born of working class parents, in a small town near Ocotlan de Morelos, a regional market town about 30 miles from Oaxaca city, Maestro Rodolfo rose to be a very wealthy man, with paintings being displayed in major galleries throughout the world. Many who have had his talent and good fortune turned their back on their roots, but not Rodolfo.

His contributions, mostly through a foundation he set up in later years, includes the renovation of fifteen churches and cultural spaces throughout the municipio of Ocotlan. The flagship of this fleet is the church and ex-convent in Ocotlan itself, a dazzling and exquisitely tasteful complex which hosts a gallery, a restaurant, and spaces for meetings, performances and classes.

There is a permanent staff of architects and other experts overseeing all the projects, but each and every project hires local young people, mostly women, to do the work of restoration. We were fortunate enough to spend some time with one of these young women, working on restoring a church in the town of Zagache, Ocotlan. When her work with the restoration project is over, she will be a qualified antiquities restorer, able to get work anywhere. This project has opened up the world to her.

Morales gave his house in Ocotlan, a colonial house, to the Casa de Cultura (state culture ministry) of Oaxaca. Aside from the beautiful garden, and the Maestro’s studio, it contains a computer classroom. The Maestro noted, a few years ago, that computers were the future, and immediately bought a roomful so the local youth could learn.

Much of the house is a sort of museum, housing Rodolfo’s collections of china, stained glass, furniture and bric-abrac; similar to Frieda’s house, and Trotzky’s house, and Abe Lincoln’s. The center of this obra (work) is, in fact, in back and on the second floor: a three-room walk-through that contains the master’s studio.

Every Friday morning, Rodolfo could be found there, painting. In the far room, surrounded by tubes of oil paint, open jars of wash, and in the last couple of years a television set, the master demonstrated to friend and stranger alike, the techniques he used to create the unique canvases that made him famous. We visited him there just three weeks ago, along with a family of friends from California.

Working on five or six pieces at once, Morales answered questions, posed for pictures, and generally played the humble host. Only the humility wasn’t put on. Rodolfo was, in bearing, manner, and presence, a truly humble person. Walking down the street in Oaxaca, he reminded me of a small-town grocer or hardware store owner.

All this past month, the Museo de Arte Contemporanéo de Oaxaca (MACO; the modern art museum) has dedicated its entire second floor to a retrospective of the maestro’s works, from a very "realistic" picture of a drunken campesino sleeping it off on a pile of refuse, to a group of cylendrical "pillars" of painted canvas.

An "out" homosexual, he gave much to the effort to control the spread of AIDS. Currently, some sixty of his prints are for sale by the Frente Común Contra SIDA (common front against AIDS), having been donated by Rodolfo to help them raise needed funds. [They can be viewed at http://www.realoaxaca.com/frente.html]

To view some of his other paintings go to http://artofoaxaca.com/morales_r.html