Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Friday's Rutamaya Event

The following message is from Anel Flores:

Estimad@s, Several years ago I exhibited a painting in a Segundo de Febrero art exposition. Out of the 60 artists exhibiting, Adriana Garcia and I were the only women in the show. Honest! I have the postcard to prove it! And, during these last ten years of exhibiting throughout the country obvious sexism radiates. Beyond sexism, the politics of who you know, when you knew them, how you knew them, what you knew about them or what you did/didn't do with them often interferes in the curator's decision to invite you to exhibit.

In fact, just browsing yesterday's Weekender proves this. And more recently (last month) I was told I couldn't exhibit my work by a curator in a local art space, because my involvement with the space would prove "Conflict of Interest;" only to find the curator exhibited five of his own paintings in the show. Isn't that conflict of interest?

At the beginning of this year a few mujeres and I were talking about these issues and how the lack of open space for artists to exhibit is an epidemic throughout our community. I decided to take on the responsibility of facilitating, not curating, an art exhibit for mujeres to do their thang! I secured a spot at Rutamaya coffee shop and after a few date changes and many conversations with mujeres over coffee, email, at parties, in a grocery store lines, classrooms and many other spaces, the Exhibit began to take shape. All I did was have the dream, facilitate the conversations, sign women up, send out about a trillion emails . . . . .and voila we are having our exhibit this upcoming Friday.

I invited one woman, they invited another, suddenly a sister wanted to be in it, a student, an employee, a teacher, coworker and on and on. Authors, singers, Mariachis, and performers started coming from every direction also. What started as something I thought would be small has now turned into 32 visual artists, 5 performers/musicians and 12 writers to share their words. ALL MUJERES! Let me take a deep breath! Exciting, right!?

I hope you have a chance to make it out to Rutamaya, on the intersection of Martin and Soledad, Friday, Dec. 7th at 7pm. We will begin with a little taste of Musica, move into the words from the "Encuentros de Mujeres" writing project, and other authors. Later, at 10:30 we will have Azul sharing her magic, and for the all nighters, Heather Go Psycho. This is the first of many projects I hope we do in San Antonio, and I hope to hear from more Mujeres who didn't get a chance to be a part of this one, for the next one! PAZ Y AMOR, ANEL