Carla Stellweg on her life and work

Carla Stellweg is a critic, curator, mentor, teacher and salonnière who has championed Latinx and Chicano art for the past sixty years. As one of the first independent curators in Mexico and founder of Latin America’s first bilingual art journal, Stellweg helped shape the Mexican art scene, incorporating a feminist politics and conceptual approach that challenged norms. of the time. On view at Museo Tamayo until October 1 “Cultivar. Homecoming to Carla Stellweg” honors Stellweg’s lasting contributions to Mexican cultural life. Below, Stellweg looks back on her career as an editor and founding artist.

I FOUNDED contemporary art magazine Visual arts with Fernando Gamboa in Mexico in 1973, when I was working at the Museo de Arte Moderno. Each issue was generally based on questions such as “What is Latin American art?” “Is there such a thing, and if so, what would Latin American art criticism look like?” There was a political aspect to the magazine, as there was a lot of civil unrest and dictatorships in Latin America at the time. There was a growing interest in Latin American art and literature abroad, and due to the political situation, many of the magazine’s artists either went into self-exile or went into exile in countries around the world. I wanted to extend these conversations and spread them as widely as possible. The magazine was published in Spanish and English and eventually began to include more and more people.

In the mid-1970s, I was doing research in Los Angeles and attended a few openings at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, a really dynamic place. I developed a friendship with the editors of LAICA Journal, and they invited me to edit an issue for them. While working on the subject, I met these two guys, including Roberto Gil de Montes, co-founder of the Los Angeles Contemporary Art Exchange. I spent a week with them learning about the Chicano art scene in LA and asked them to edit an issue about the art landscape there that went beyond Mexican muralism. From there, the Visual arts number on chicano art was born. The cover is a photograph of Louis Carlos Bernal. I loved how cinematic the colors and composition were, how it showed that inside view of Chicano life. The magazine had always advocated non-traditional forms of artistic creation, so it included reproductions and articles on photonovelascomics, cartoons, low riders, DIY films, performances and street art.

At that time, UNESCO announced that it was the year of women. I decided to organize the first discussion on the role of women in the Mexican art world at the Museo de Arte Moderno. I felt that was something that really needed to be explored – it wasn’t really a conversation in Mexico. There was feminism, but at the time, the popular approach was like: “There is no feminist art: we are all artists, we are all international”, which, for me, amounted to taking a political position on the existing standards. It seemed like the time to shake things up in the Mexican art scene. In fact, it was well received by the women of the city and opened the doors to this discussion and became the subject of the Spring 1976 issue of Visual arts. Apart from individual subscriptions, we have been fortunate to be placed in a number of international museum and foundation libraries, bookstores, newsstands and galleries. Suddenly, in 1981, we were censored and the magazine had to cease publication.

At the beginning the homenaje was going to be a series of panels with people (Edward Sullivan, Anna Indych-López, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and others) from South America and New York that I had worked with during different phases of my career . Eventually it was decided that there was enough material to make an exhibition. It was then that the curator Pablo León de la Barra intervened with Andrea Valencia, who was already at the Museo Tamayo. After that, they started coming to see my archives and my art collection in Cuernavaca, since I had closed my loft in New York. Ultimately, they told me they wanted to allow viewers to connect with me, not just the professional aspects of my career, but who I am as a human being. It was truly a labor of love in the way the exhibit is put together. THE homenajes I’ve seen before have been posthumous, and I’m alive and well.

There are two paintings by Myra Landau in the exhibit that I have included in the Women’s Colloquium at the Museo de Arte Moderno and a number of Visual arts. I was a huge fan of his work and then in the 90s we lost touch. Around 2008, we met again and I organized an exhibition of his work in 2018 at Henrique Faria in New York. I’ve always been drawn to her art – it’s like she’s writing and weaving in this secret script. There are two other pieces from my collection that I am delighted to have included in the exhibition. One is from Alejandro Diaz, who I know from working at Blue Star in San Antonio. He is known for these cardboard signs. Mine says “Free cocktails for nut ladies”. The other is a mop-turned bible made by one of my amazing art students, Maximiliano Siñani, who is of Bolivian Inca Quechua descent. One day he brought this piece to my loft in New York, and I was like, “What is this? A comment on the Catholic Church? He told me that in Bolivia, missionaries distributed free Bibles every month; everyone has this abundance of bibles when they could be [using those resources toward] cleaning of all churches. I thought that was such a humorous statement. I hope that younger generations will be inspired by the exhibition. A lot of people have all these expectations of what they should do or do and stop dead in their tracks. Face the sun and see where it takes you.

– As said to Courtney Yoshimura