Different Strokes

Within a week of moving to Oaxaca de Juárez, I’d met about 90 percent of the town’s serious artists. This is not so remarkable: They’re everywhere. The most prominent citizen in town, Francisco Toledo – generally regarded as Mexico’s greatest living painter – is ubiquitous, wandering the streets in wrinkled clothes and old huaraches. Locals enjoy stories about restaurants denying him entrance when he’s mistaken for a homeless guy. Toledo, however, is far from homeless; his works sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I didn’t encounter Maestro Toledo immediately. On my second night, however, I did encounter a large pink building: a video store being converted into a new experimental art gallery. I walked in and asked if I could curate a show, and this being Oaxaca – absurdly open to new ideas – they accepted.

Elsewhere, people argue that painting is dead, but Oaxaca – where wide boulevards are banked by stately colonial buildings and serious restaurants – is proof to the contrary. “I think it’s one of the few places where people are allowed to say, ‘I’m a painter,’” says Fernando Aceves Humana, himself a celebrated artist. “It’s not a bad word.” Aceves Humana paints arresting, quiet landscapes of places soon to be destroyed. One series, a morbid take on the Oaxacan tradition of animal imagery, celebrates extinct species.

Aceves Humana exhibits internationally, as does Guillermo Olguín, whom many consider the heir to Toledo. His huge canvases incorporate indigenous iconography and sometimes actual pieces of Oaxaca: sand and soil. Olguín enjoys rebel status in the city. At six-foot-five, he’s often found helmetless on his battered BMW motorbike (for which he traded a painting). He runs a notorious bar, a quasi-speakeasy called Café Central. The last time I met him, he insisted I climb on the back of his bike and drove us to a favourite restaurant, which was more of a cantina-like affair hidden behind a restaurant. I can’t really recommend the street-front place, but the secret backroom was superb. I’d tell you where it is, but he’d kill me.

I had not come to Oaxaca to curate. I’d come to finish a novel, eat good food and be warmer in February than I would have been in Manhattan. Before my exhibition here, I had, in fact, only ever curated one show in my life, in the very different atmosphere of Chelsea. Oaxaca simply breeds art.

You don’t even have to leave the street to come up against it. When I saw one particularly virtuosic style of graffiti, I asked about it and was introduced to Demián Flores Cortés, who is just as famous as Olguín. Much of his work is on canvas, but the galleries can’t quite contain him: He has collaborated on pieces with graffiti collectives Arte Jaguar and Excusado Printsystem, and created an informal cultural centre in an old tannery – La Curtiduría – which stages ambitious events and hosts artists from all over the world.

This is something of a trend in Oaxaca. If you’re an important artist, you don’t just make art; you found a social institution, host a salon, manage a bar or curate an exhibition in a café. This may well be the influence of Toledo, who has poured millions into cultural institutions, such as Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (IAGO) and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (MACO), where works by Zapotec artist Rufino Tamayo hang next to Rothkos and Warhols.

Oaxaca has recently entered the postmodern world, where – shockingly – people do stuff other than paint. One gallery in particular, Galería Manuel García Arte Contemporáneo on the Zócalo, the city’s main square, has offered a venue for the next generation of Oaxacan art. The work here is often curated by two artists, Jessica Wozny and Luis Hampshire (known collectively as Plan B), who specialize in all manner of unexpected artistic techniques.

Wozny herself doesn’t paint; she knits. But instead of cute sweaters, she knits objects that could be mistaken for flesh-eating microbes. Another local artist, Gabriela León, also employs once-banal feminine crafts in subversive ways. During the political uprising of May 2006, she made a dress out of barbed wire from the barricades, burnt rubber and the carcass of a mattress and wore it down to the Zócalo to say hello to the riot police. The dress has since been shown around the world, and León – surprise, surprise – now houses a regular art salon, with contributors from as far away as India.



I finally did meet Maestro Toledo. He was holding court at IAGO when I approached him nervously to request a piece for the show. He graciously complied, and painters and postmodernists ended up cheerfully cheek by jowl in the huge pink edifice. My timing was fortuitous: Oaxaca has had a pretty happening art scene for, oh, a few centuries, but, occasionally, things come together to make the whole world take notice.

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