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Feb. 23--"The African Presence in Mexico: From Yanga to the Present" is the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum's ambitious series of three concurrent exhibitions that call upon art to tell their story without making art the primary focus.
That, of course, is common at history museums and showplaces dedicated to specific communities. But treating paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures and prints as documents rather than objects resulting from creative practice also has spread in recent decades to art museums, with the result that viewers mind not at all if the story at the heart of the exhibition holds attention.
This time the nature of the shows -- they are said to make up the most comprehensive examination of African contributions to Mexican culture ever mounted -- ensures that interest will be high, and the presence of works by artists that include Rufino Tamayo, Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Elizabeth Catlett help keep it so. But, as is the case in shows of this kind, the aesthetic quality of works is less important than what the works depict, so anonymous craftsmen and emerging contemporary artists are represented as well as creators recognized from the pages of art histories.
The first show, which gives all three their collective title, is the largest and most impressive, tracing the African influence in Mexican culture from 1519 to the present. Here artworks treat both the general African presence and specific leaders such as Yanga, who in the early 17th Century founded the first free African township in the Americas. The room devoted to the Mexican Revolution is particularly rich, with the large painting by Tamayo as well as photographs by Agustin Casasola, though the raising of subject matter above all else is also underlined by a number of pieces shown only in reproduction.
Works by several Afro-Mexicano artists -- Ignacio Canela, Mario Guzman, Guillermo Vargas, Hermengildo Gonzalez -- are presented in the first exhibition, whereas they would be equally at home in the second, "Who Are We Now?" This is made up of living artists, who treat both distant and recent American history in paintings, prints, photographs and installations. Here the socially oriented printmaking of Carlos Cortez finds a special place, benefiting from the political context of works that treat Martin Luther King Jr. -- Mexico honored him with a stamp a decade before the United States did -- and Malcolm X among others.
Throughout, a great deal of information, some of it painful, is transmitted by text panels and documentary material. This is skipped at one's peril, for the art makes sense only within the shifts of nearly five centuries of African-Mexican relations.
I could do without the video loop of Jesus Garcia eulogizing Harold Washington, as its sound overpowers all the art in the gallery. Yet the harmonious relation depicted is one of the show's high points, whereas the art often shows separateness.
Much here is unfamiliar to the communities treated and will be an entirelynew world to other viewers who should welcome the complex lesson in cultural history.
"The African Presence in Mexico: From Yanga to the Present" continues at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, 1852 W. 19th St., through Sept. 3. 312-738-1503.
aartner@tribune.com
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