Event 3: Fowler Museum

I had attended the Spanish art exhibit at the Fowler Museum. It had a variety of different concepts with some sort of relation to the Hispanic community: culture, artists or location.

Within one of the exhibits all of the art was based on the idea of recycling. Many of the art pieces were created from other everyday objects. The following piece appeared to be a vest made from old handbags, backpacks and leather clothing. Art like this reminds me of the possibilities that result from just the idea of recycling. A person can take broken and separated objects from a variety of different sources and recombine them together to form something new. This concept has been used throughout time with both science and art where a combination of something old creates something new.

In another exhibit, a war ship is depicted and casted out of silver. Although it appears to be simply an extremely well detailed and casted silver ship, it is much more. The ship actually acted as a bottle caddy with a number of places to hold bottles of wine. It is rumored that this toy was used to roll bottles of wine from one end of a table to another for the enjoyment of drunk adults. The silver used in pieces like this most likely originated from slave labor in Spanish mines.

The following is a paper mache creation reflecting a scene drawn by artist Jose Posada of the Cemetery of the Red Little Devil. The artist Felipe Linares recreated the scene utilizing paper mache into a three dimensional object adding his own flair. This particular creation was created during the Mexican Revolution when anger was high towards politicians and landowners. It bares many resemblances to art used for the Day of the Dead celebrations, which directly comes from Linares’ specialty of Day of the Dead projects. 

The vest holds a modern approach of recycling old material to create something new. The ship contains material derived from slave labor originated from Spain. While the last object has great cultural significance by signifying the anger during the Revolution. Despite all having some sort of Spanish origin, each of the projects is unique and tells of a different story.