HispanicBusiness

OAKLAND, Calif. (AScribe Newswire) – "Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum" highlights more than 200 years of Latino art from across the United States. This exhibition of 64 paintings, sculptures and photographs represents many cultural traditions, illustrating the wide range of expression developed by artists of Latin heritage who have settled in the United States and Puerto Rico. The exhibition will be on view at the Oakland Museum of California from November 2, 2002 to January 26, 2003.

"These artists present human stories that are at once culturally specific, but also universal," said Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Many of the artists in Arte Latino explore issues of personal identity through cultural heritage. They include both U.S.-born and immigrant artists, among them Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans and Chicanos, Cuban Americans and other Latin Americans who have created art throughout the United States. The current exhibition is a sampling of these rich traditions, selected from almost 500 Latino artworks in the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection.

The earliest works on view are from Puerto Rico, which became a territory of the United States in 1898. Others reflect the heritage of the Hispanic Southwest, from 18th-century religious carvings to recent works that reinterpret traditional images using the language of today.

Several contemporary artists have combined American popular culture with their Latino experience to stimulate dialogue and encourage activism. The Chicano Movement of the 1960s, in particular, inspired artists to address social and political issues. Many Cuban American artists and those who moved from Central and South America express a divided identity, reflecting their feelings about leaving family and their past behind them.

The sole national visibility partner and local presenting sponsor of Arte Latino is the Principal Financial Group.

"The Principal is thrilled to assist in bringing some of America's finest treasures to the public," said J. Barry Griswell, president and CEO, the Principal Financial Group. "We are especially excited to bring Arte Latino to the Oakland area. This tour is one more way we can contribute to a deeper understanding and appreciation of our country's rich Latino heritage. We hope people from across the West will take advantage of this opportunity to view this remarkable exhibition."

The exhibition includes works by a number of Chicano artists living in California. These artists incorporate in their art explorations of personal and cultural identity related to dealing with life as persons of Mexican descent in the United States. Some of these are explicitly political, like Frank Romero's 1986 painting "Death of Ruben Salazar," an image of the police shooting of a newspaper columnist and investigative reporter who is considered by many a martyr for the Chicano cause. Other works, like "Screen" by Roberto Gil de Montes (1996), express personal issues of identity in universal terms.

Carmen Lomas Garza, now a resident of California, draws on a rich folk art tradition and on her childhood in Kingsville, Texas, to create paintings filled with real-life observations as well as universally shared experiences. In "Camas para Suenos (Beds for Dreams)," painted in 1985, the artist and her sister appear as children seated on the roof of their home. They look at the stars and dream about their future as their mother turns down their beds. Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, daughter of a Chicana mother and a father of Huichol Indian descent, expresses a quite different feeling in the 1994 wall hanging "Virgen de los Caminos (Virgin of the Roads)," into which she weaves the rage, pain, history and hope of her forebears.