The May Festival and a California artist’s 10 years in Guadalajara are the framework for an exhibition at the Instituto Cultural Cabañas in downtown Guadalajara.
But if you go expecting normal pottery or paintings, you’ll have to hold on to your hat, because Eduardo Sarabia’s focus in the seven-room, 90-piece show is drug trafficking and materialism, his flavor is a bit picante (with undertones of sugar), and his media are diverse, ranging from pottery to video and everything in between.
A long, strange and seemingly comic episode in Sarabia’s life set the temper for much of his work. Although Sarabia was born in Los Angeles, his grandfather remained rooted in Sinaloa, a northwestern state that suffers its share of drug trafficking. The grandfather often told young Eduardo about a treasure of Pancho Villa that was supposedly secreted in the nearby mountains, so after the grandfather died, Sarabia set about organizing an expedition, complete with investors and certificates, with the goal of finding the lost loot.
The treasure remained lost, but the experience became a treasure-trove of artistic inspiration, and a lot of the work in the show, including two dizzying films, is based on what the artist uncovered, in himself and others, while tramping around in the Mexican-American money-, drug- and gun-crazed milieu.
Sarabia’s art is uncommon and so, as the treasure-hunt story suggests, were his early years, according to Cabañas staffer Claudia Chavez, who smilingly explained that he began his artistic endeavors at age 6 and, after navigating the usual behavioral challenges of American boys, at the age of 13 — amazingly — won a scholarship to study art in the Soviet Union (around the time of its break-up).
If you are beginning to suspect that Sarabia is no parlor artist, you are correct. He is now totally immersed in the Mexican culture, and one of his more daring interventions in Guadalajara was hanging a narco-style banner from a highway overpass, but with a peace-and-love message to counter the narcos’ grim verbiage. “AMOR ES LA RESPUESTA” (Love is the answer), it proclaimed, in dripping red-and-black, capital letters. (The banner and photos of two masked men — presumably Sarabias and an accomplice — hanging it at Avila Camacho and Alcalde streets form a small part of the exhibit.)
Sarabia’s many other works — his blue-and-white ceramic pots that look traditional until you get up close and notice their gun-and-marijuana motifs, his life-size, cartoonish sculptures of narcos and narco-fighters or mermaids floating in seas full of strange objects, his naked women perched on car hoods and issuing forth from cornucopias, the logotyped vegetable “packing boxes” he created as bases for some of his works, his dreamlike videos and films of Culiacan, Sinaloa, and the rugged country in that state, complete with dancers and shamans — take drug-trafficking and its attendant materialism as starting points. They are the most arresting part of the show.
Although many of Sarabia’s “paintings” that fill the first room have been taken by local media as emblematic of his work, in reality they were sketches for his provocative, three-dimensional work. (And, yes, one problem with the exhibit may be that much of the richness of Sarabia’s work will be lost on visitors who don’t have a friendly museum staffer to explain things.)
The only work on display that does not seem tied to these provocative themes is a German tequila “bar” in the first, small salon, which was contructed by Sarabia, as well as the large, final room, a collection of paintings of mostly faces that, according to my guide, were created from a mountain of trip snapshots that the artist later used as painting palettes and which he then enlarged and painted. Although these large paintings are as difficult to understand as they were to explain (the friendly staffer had to tell me the snapshot, palette and enlargement business twice), one of them was taken as emblematic of the show and used in its posters and publicity.
Eduardo Sarabias Retrospective is showing at Instituto Cultural Cabañas until August 17. Plaza Tapatias (Cabañas 8) about five blocks behind (east of) Teatro Degollado. (33) 3818-2800, 3668-1800, ex. 31051, 31065, 31642. Cost: 70 pesos for adult foreigners, includes admission to everything in Cabañas, including other shows and the famed Orozco murals. Officials say that showing their “Residente” card gets foreigners in for the normal price of 45 pesos. 20 pesos for seniors and children 6 to 12 years old. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m; Tuesdays free.