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Museum to Display Mexican Art

Posted on: Wednesday, 14 December 2005, 21:00 CST

By Karen Klinka, The Daily Oklahoman, The Daily Oklahoman

Dec. 14--A new exhibit at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art will showcase artworks by three masters of Mexican mural art.

When: Thursday through March 26.

Where: Oklahoma City Museum of Art, 415 Couch Drive.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.

Admission: $7 for adults and $5 senior citizens age 62 and older and children 5 and younger.

Information: 236-3100, ext. 237.

"Mexican Masters: Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros, Selections from the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil" will open Thursday and remain on display through March 26.

Executive Director Carolyn Hill said Oklahoma City will be the exhibit's only U.S. venue.

With selections made from the Carrillo Gil Collection in Mexico City, the exhibition will introduce Oklahomans to the dominant Mexican artists of the 1930s and 1940s and their successors, Hill said.

The exhibit will feature 68 works by artists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as related works by Luis Nishizawa and Gunther Gerzso.

"This exhibit continues our museum's overall objective to bring great art to Oklahoma City that many people here would not otherwise be able to see," Hill said. "It's going to be glorious."

Hill said the exhibit was assembled by Chief Curator Hardy George and Ernesto Sanchez, the museum's curatorial deputy for Hispanic exhibitions, with the help and guidance of guest curator Armando Saenz Carrillo of Mexico City.

George said the works in the exhibit "are equivalent to the great murals of Rome."

"These artworks are internationally important," George said. "The people of Mexico feel great pride in them -- they're part of their national identity."

Compared with the huge, well-known murals by Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros, which can't be moved, the relatively small scale works in this exhibition might at first appear uncharacteristic, the chief curator said.

"However, in most of these works, the harsh life of the Mexican peasant and the brutality of civil war are portrayed with a directness and honesty not always seen in the murals," he said.

George said the artworks in the exhibit were amassed over many decades by art patron Alvar Carrillo Gil, who bequeathed the artworks to the Mexican nation.

Sanchez, who worked at a museum in Monterrey in northeastern Mexico before coming to Oklahoma City, said Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros are known as "the Big Three" of mural art in his homeland.

"We consider their paintings to be part of our national heritage," he said.

Sanchez said he hopes the exhibit will encourage more people from Oklahoma's Hispanic community to visit the museum.

To make Spanish-speaking visitors feel more welcome, all the artwork titles and descriptions inside the "Mexican Masters" exhibit will be printed in both English and Spanish, Sanchez said.

School tours that need a Spanish-speaking docent for an exhibit visit are asked to call ahead, he said.

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Source: The Daily Oklahoman

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