Raymond Bonilla, “Escuchas,” 2009, oil on canvas
Raymond Bonilla’s Escuchas (2009) is a diptych about the psychological confines of family values and tradition. The two paintings depict a gray-haired woman and a man, painted in the chiaroscuro of Spanish baroque. They are dressed casually, with white sleeveless shirts that engender a sense of intimacy. The figures are seated in a frontal view while looking downward, with their torso and arms to show their clasped hands — because when they were being addressed by their Puerto Rican parents while they were young, they could not look them in the eye, and had to place their hands together in a sign of respect. Bonilla depicts the two older adults in this way to performatively place how they were raised. This work sets the tone for the exhibition, about the invisible forces that compel or repel us toward home.
Terry Evans, “MCAT, Trinity River, July 4, 2013,” 2014, inkjet print
The current exhibition at the Art Museum of South Texas is the third exhibition from the partnership of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art Cohort in the Art Bridges Foundation Cohort Program, after Native Impressions and Photography is Art. After this show closes at Corpus Christi, the exhibition will travel to the Amarillo Museum of Art and the Ellen Noël Art Museum in Odessa, the two other cohort members. The show brings together a selection of artworks from each of the five institutions’ collections. It is divided into four themes: Home, Family, Honor, and Loss. The theme’s relationship to the title appears incongruous, particularly as the exhibition was divided into three galleries, with the themes Honor and Loss sharing one gallery — it seems Family and Honor as representing the title’s theme of love could have been paired together instead. Nevertheless, the exhibition succeeds in bringing together shared notions of home, between family and communities, into a wide-ranging reflection.
Earlie Hudnall, Jr., “Wheels,” 1993, gelatin silver print
Ave Bonar, “In Custody of Border Patrol, Brownsville,” 1984, gelatin silver print
The section for the theme of family is the largest within the exhibition, and there is a strong representation of photographs as a medium. Terry Evans’s MCAT, Trinity River, July 4, 2013 (2014) is a birds-eye-view photo of various North Texas families that have gathered together for Independence Day, showing working- and middle-class urbanites lounging on river banks, snacking on chips, tostadas, sodas, and beer. There’s a cold anthropological perspective applied here, as though the groupings of families are displayed as objects of study. From an opposite end of the spectrum, Earlie Hudnall, Jr.’s Wheels (1993) depicts the warmth between the photographer and the subjects. Four young Black boys pause playing on the ground as they smile and each prop their faces up toward the camera, describing a sense of family as shared between friends within a close-knit community. The show reverts to a dystopian theme with Ave Bonar’s In Custody of Border Patrol, Brownsville (1984), which shows two men seated on a metal bench, with a wide-angled mirror above them showing two more people across the room as a sign of surveillance. The ruthless waiting and the vacant cold of the institutional setting is a stark reminder of the border bureaucracy that deprives people of their connection to their families, and therefore their humanity.
Francisco Delgado, “Catharsis I,” 2004, serigraph
The theme of home is represented in works such as Francisco Delgado’s Catharsis I (2004), where a man wearing a sombrero is driving a modified car with a large cactus tied to the top, navigating along a wall of tires and West Texas hills in the background. Printed on the car are various rasquache signs such as “Taco Hell” and “Mr. Clean,” as well as a United Farm Workers logo and the number 187, short for California Proposition 187, which barred undocumented immigrants from accessing public services, becoming a symbol for one of the national flashpoints of Latinx voting-rights activism during the 1990s. Here, home is represented in solidarity as bringing together Chicano/a ideology in the US-Mexico borderlands.
Mark Bradford, “In which he shall be,” 2022, mixed media on canvas
Jimmy Peña, “Gravity,” 2003, serigraph
As the show segues from the themes of family and home to honor and loss, there is an interstitial space in between the galleries that bridge the two areas, showcasing solely two works. The first work is Mark Bradford’s In which he shall be (2022), which crops together passages from the US Constitution. Powerful words such as “We the People,” “Each State Shall Have,” “Indians Not Taxed,” and “Sole Power of Impeachment” are written on the canvas in mixed media. There is an appearance of a rip, or a burn mark, across a diagonal divide, as though the document is in the midst of destruction, implicating the scale of our current Constitutional crisis. Next to this work is Jimmy Peña’s Gravity (2003), a serigraph made to commemorate the lives lost during 9/11, with a collage of clippings from the Corpus Christi Caller Times reporting on the Iraq War, a direct result of the terrorist event. At the center, a figure in blue sits with his head lowered in immense grief.
Tom Jones, ChakShepSkaKah (White Eagle), “Arlene Greengrass-Rodriguez,” 2017, inkjet print
Ángel Rodríguez-Diaz, “Stepping into the Light…Quinceañera,” 2008, serigraph
Lahib Jaddo, “Regeneration,” 1994, oil on canvas
The themes of loss and honor are shown through Tom Jones’s photograph of Arlene Greengrass-Rodriguez, a Ho-Chunk veteran who is memorialized through a display of a flag pole dedicated to her, with her portrait, a flag cover, and a basket strewn with tobacco products at the base of the pole. The tobacco would be lit during a Memorial Day Powwow, with its smoke relaying prayers to the Creator. Ángel Rodríguez-Diaz’s Stepping into the Light…Quinceañera (2008) is a photorealistic serigraph of the Ashley Garcia, a daughter of a family friend to the artist. She is surrounded by swirling patterns of roses, glowing amidst the celebrations of her fifteenth birthday, a time-honored tradition within South Texas Latino/a families. In Lahib Jaddo’s Regeneration (1994), a young woman, the artist’s daughter, lies across the bottom of the composition surrounded by vines, while above, the history weighs heavily against her with a panoramic view of a cemetery in Bagdad, Iraq. An insert of a scene at the top left depicts the family’s matriarch visiting a grave, providing a closer-up view of the many figures within the wide burial grounds. This work, as representing the exhibition as a whole, brings together the view of generations and the enduring traditions shared within the bonds that exist in our physical and metaphorical homes.
Home, Love, and Loss is on view at the Art Museum of South Texas through April 27.
