Good Natured Murals

When you see the sign for Good Natured Futons on 400 N. Fourth Avenue, you'd hardly expect to find a Mexican folk art shop filled with handmade shrines and authentic pottery. But although the shop specializes in putting together furniture to sell, the front area doubles as a folk art store that creates original Day of the Dead shrines every year. Even better, the back wherehouse area is in the process of transforming into a vivid Tucson mural.

Owner Yolanda Jacques said that the mural on the back of her store was vandalized in the past, so they decided to take it down and put up a new one. The artists are friends of employee Randy Reynolds's son, who go by the tag names Psyche 1 and Big Goose. "They're good kids," Reynolds said. "They're not gang members or anything like that. It's keeping them off the streets."

When you look at the mural up close, all you can see is a bunch of colorful blocks, outlined in bright colors and surrounded by a bold single-hued background. But when you back up, you can see that the blocks are actually the taglines of the artists, which are still in progress. In the middle, there is a cartoonish human face with pearl-like teeth, with a thought bubble that says, "W." This stands for one of the artist's names.

The mural was painted over a previous picture of hell and devils surrounding the immense taglines. When it's done, the new mural is expected to have pictures as well as the letters. Although Jacques had hoped it would be finished by the time of the Street Fair, she expects it'll be finished by August at the latest.

The mural has become the envy of the surrounding neighborhood. "Everybody around here wants stuff put on there," Reynolds said. It's not surprising, since the piece is on the back of a store that would normally just sell futons. At least now, the outside art will reflect the vivacious colors and original pieces of the inside.

A colorful history

The Seri Indian ironwood sculptures may not seem to fit in with the vibrant paintings and shrines of Mexican folk art. Their minimalist form and plain brown color is antithetical to the extravagant hues of the milagros and miniature murals. But the carvings have an interesting history and an authentic origin.

The Seri Indians are a group of native hunter-gatherers in Sonora, Mexico, who have managed to preserve their indigenous ways by living in isolation for most of their history on a small island named Tiburon off the Sea of Cortez. Although, their numbers are dwindling. While in the 1890s they reached a population of 2,000, today they’re down to about 500.


What’s more interesting about the tribe, is that throughout their history, they’ve avoided the practice of farming and cultivation, as well as animal domestication. Until the mid-1900s, they depended solely on fishing. But Mexican policies such as a failed fishing cooperative in the ‘30s and the onslaught of commercial shrimping, which disturbed the economy starting in the ‘50s, forced the Seri to branch out and find other means to make money.

This is where their art comes in. When the ironwood carving industry was born, the Seri took ship and moved off Tiburon to camps such as Desemboque, close to Hermosillo. The Seri create simplistic carvings, as well as woven baskets and necklaces made from shell, stone, seeds, and other inexhaustible resources.

The Seri artist Jose Astorga is mainly credited with developing the genre into what it is today. He began to experiment in the early ‘60s with making utilitarian products such as spoons, bowls, barrettes and paperweights. When an American tourist who was planning to make a desert tortoise doorstep sought out Astorga in 1963, she gave him the idea to carve animal art.

The ironwood carving industry took off in 1968 when UofA students took trips down to the their villages to look at and purchase pieces. Before then, Jose Astorga and his wife Rosa only had a small customer base. Today, the animal pieces have actually grown more primitive, because tourists favor simplistic designs over realism. When carvers began to add nail heads for eyes or carved mouths, the buyers rejected the pieces for more minimalist forms.

Today, the price of Seri carvings have increased fourfold, because the ironwood tree is becoming more and more rare. In May of 1994, Mexico declared it a protected species, making it much harder to find and carve specimens. But the Seri continue to carve for their livelihood, especially since the name is cherished by carvers all over the country, many of whom will put stickers on their works saying “Handmade by Seri” to increase the price for unknowing tourists.

While the animal carvings may not look as colorful as a woven rug or milagro, their history is.

Art for Poster-ity

When the genres of film and painting collide, another genre of Mexican art splits from the friction. Where there is art, there is poster art, and some of the most startling examples of figure-painting, surrealism and fantasy you can find. The last 40 years of Mexican cinema, unlike in the United States which moved to photographs quickly, were the breeding grounds for professional and amatuer poster artists.


I picked up the book, "Mas! Cine Mexicano: Sensational Movie Posters from 1957-1990" the other day, and was surprised at how many posters there actually were. The collector, Rogelio Agrasanchez Jr., avidly obsessed with this underrated style of art, had 2,500 posters in his house alone, not to mention 12,000 lobby cards and 80,000 film stills. In his book, he showcases some of his favorites in a search to elucidate the intricacies of the movie genre.

Most of these posters are from sensationalist movies like horror films and action flicks, but we also see posters from westerns, comedies, dramas, chick flicks, family films and more. In the introduction, Agrasanchez explains that the large variety was a product of the industry growing into itself in the '60s. It was becoming more established, and the main form of entertainment for the family had not yet moved solely to the television. Therefore, directors were given a lot of money and free reign to create their own films. Besides the main film company in Mexico, Churubusco-Azteca Studios, there were also two other organizations that would churn out movies extremely quickly: Estudios America and Estudios San Angel Inn.

The '60s also showcased the rise of the luchador, which shows up in many of the posters: the masked Mexican wrestler who epitomized good and evil in and out of the ring. The character, Santo, was first based on a comic book, but was brought to life by Rodolpho Guzman Huerta wearing a silver mask.

The Mexican movie genre was very much about celebrities, much like in the United States. Popular stars back then drew huge audiences and kept them coming back for more: singers like Luis Aguilar and "Una Mujer Sin Precio" with a blonde chick that closely resembles Anita Ekberg in "La Dolce Vida." There are tons of action movie posters with fancy cars, guns and men looking staunchly serious. There are goofy caricatures drawn for family comedies. You can find every spectrum of drawing underneath the genre's head. The only problem looking at this book, is that when you're finished, you might like the posters better than the movies themselves.



This is a few minutes from the film "Lola La Trailera" which originally premiered in 1983.

Tucson Arts Incubator is about to Incubate

Although the gallery format has been criticized and consistently scrutinized for its lack of inclusion in the shaping of modern art, Dinnerware Gallery on Congress is actively trying to combat that image. Owner David Aguirre is opening up a new gallery just down the street, that will accept any submissions as long as they're from UA or Pima Community College students. To be showcased in the Tucson Arts Incubator, you no longer have to have connections or an established name. All you have to do is pay $8 for each piece you showcase, and when it sells you'll get 100 percent of the profit.

When I visited the Incubator Gallery, on Congress St. between The Grill and Vaudeville Cabaret, paintings were strewed about the room, some on top of others, and the place looked rather dusty. Not to mention, the gallery in itself was hard to find, because it was nestled in a tiny alcove between two bars. The formal opening wasn't for another few days (Saturday, March 15), and the task at hand was only to acquire enough pieces, and not to showcase them as of yet. I talked to the gallery attendent UA student Carly Cutrone, and she said that students often find it harder to show off their voice.

"It's going to be a regular gallery, but its focus is college students," she said. Cutrone let me look around, and right away I spotted a few paintings that dealt with the concept of border. "Mimic" by Samantha Angiulo is a grotesquely extravagant mixed media collage, featuring two skeletons facing eachother in a fury of colors. The figure on the left is covered in nuerons and nerves, like a medical diagram. Her hair is another piece of paper, possibly from a magazine, that shows multiple close-ups of flowers. If you look closely at her body, it is actually made of dozens of miniature typewriters.

The second figure is a more traditional Mexican skeleton (found in a lot of border art) and is upside down facing its counterpart. Typeface is behind it, and a string outlines the figure and trails off into the painting.
Besides Angiulos's work, i also found three interesting pieces by Adon Banuelos. [I took pictures of all these, but am awaiting emails from the artists to put them up.] Banuelos also painted traditional Mexican skeletons, but put hipster icons like Nike shoes and sunglasses around them, anthropomorphizising them as well as updated them to a more modern form. Baneulos painted his creations on the back of old skateboards, a medium that would probably get overlooked in a regular gallery setting.

The Tucson Arts Incubator isn't necessarily solely a haven for border art as of yet, but with its wide inclusion and counter-culture attitude, look for it as a political and artistic force on the border for years to come.

The art of charity

The snotty high-brow attitude can't last forever. Sometimes, the most authentic and inspirational pieces of Mexican art are not art at all; not sold in a gallery or on display at a museum or sitting at an expensive trade shop. Sometimes, they're piled under a wad of sweat shirts and bicycle parts. The crafts and decorations at St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store, on South Sixth Avenue and Stone, prove that it doesn't need to cost a hundred bucks to visually embrace a culture.
St. Vincent the organization has a rich history: It began as a Catholic charity in 1833 when a law student at the Sorbonne (in Paris), Frédéric Ozanam, was challenged during a debate to show what he and his peers were doing to help people in need. Within weeks, the 20-year-old created the "Conference of Charity," which had him and his friends going door-to-door giving out foods and necessities payed for out of their own pocket. Soon after, the charity organization grew 600-strong. Now, the operation has expanded to thrift stores, shelters, outreach programs, employment services and more.
This particular Vincent de Paul store is located on the edge of downtown, where the small shops and local flavor the south side begins. The store is one of the biggest Tucson has to offer, with seperate rooms for clothing, art, stitching materials, bicycles and patio faire, plates and furniture. St. Vincent even has a room where the less-well-off can shop for basically free.
When you search around, you can find countless examples of Mexican arts and crafts. For example, I saw these Mexican puppets; so old that the color was chipping off, with strings tangled together and dusty faces. But that gives them all the more character. Another interesting series of artifacts are the life-like diaramas of miniature saints. While they may seem goofy to us, these are used as religious shrines for many Mexican Catholics.
St. Vincent has a plethora of bizarre, beautiful and original objects. If you just take the time to dig, you might be rewarded.