[-empyre-] Grace Quintanilla (and Priamo Lozada)

[Timothy Conway Murray]

Hi, everyone,

This week, I plan to make a number of different posts in honor my dear friend, Grace Quintanilla, and it's great to be able to do so in dialogue with Ana Valdés.

To begin with, some background about our budding friendship and the early new media environment in Mexico.  In 1999 I curated a large exhibition of artworks created on/for CD-Rom, "Contact Zones: the Art of CD-Rom" (https://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu).  I had first thought that I would do a small exhibition at Cornell of works by some of my Australian friends who were blazing the trail in CD-Rom art, Norie Neumark & Maria Miranda, Stelarc, Suzanne Treister, Gary Zebbington, Michele Barker and others.  On a whim, I decided to put out a call for work on the emergent new listserv, Rhizome, with only a three-week window for submissions.  To my astonishment, packages began pouring in and I received around 120 submissions from all across the globe, and ended up curating a travelling exhibition of some 80 artworks from 22 countries.  That this could have happened, and happened so quickly, was truly astonishing, and demonstrated the promise of curating across the network.

Among the works that appeared as if mysteriously were two fabulous submissions from Mexico, "Subterranean," by D.R. Isaias (Melquix) Ortega, and "Viceversa" by Grace Quintanilla.  I'll say more about "Viceversa" in another post but now want to provide a little more context about Grace.  After the Cornell show ended after a 6 week run in eight venues across the campus, I put out another call to see whether anyone might be interested in hosting it.  Again, rather out of the blue, I received an email from the fabulous curator, Priamo Lozada, that he would like to bring the show to Mexico for an exhibition in the brand new media room at the Centro de la Imagen, directed by Patricia Mendoza (Priamo, sadly, also has left us, having died from a tragic accident in Venice following the launch party celebrating his curation of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Mexico Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale).   It was during the preparations and installation of this exhibition that I came to appreciate Grace Quintanilla and the energetic marvels of the new media community in Mexico.  Quietly behind the scenes, Grace assisted Priamo and me in the production of a full catalogue in Spanish in little over a month (with many long nights on the internet when even the thought of working virtually was still a turn on).  I still remember the force she brought to the opening party as she came with a full entourage from the Quintanilla and Cobo families including her uncle and aunt Cobo who she featured in Viceversa --  her uncle, Roberto Cobo is well known for his portrayal of "El Jaibo" in Bunuel's 1950 classic, "Los Olvidados" and her aunt was a well-known caberet dancer). It was only too cool to be sharing tequila shots with this artistic family.   As a result of that trip,  I still sit surrounded in my study by masks and artifacts that Grace encouraged me to bring home from the fabulous craft market near Centro de la Imagen -- Grace was so proud of the craft heritage of Mexico and so deeply wanted to share it with me and Renate, just as she continued so generously to send us copies of her digital and video works across the next two decades.

Since that time, Grace, Renate, and I had the occasion to conference together twice in Ithaca -- most recently only two years ago for the opening conference of my exhibition, "Signal to Code: 50 Years of Media Art in the Goldsen Archive" -- and also in Buenos Aires a few years back when I introduced her digital world to my Latin American colleagues in the traditional humanities.  Although my fellow humanities center directors were often skeptical of my passion for new media, they fell head over heels during Grace's presentation of her heroic community building through her Center for Digital Culture in Mexico.  Grace had that kind of magnetism both in her presentation of her projects and in her impact on artistic minds across cultures and communities.  As proud as she was of her inventive and playful art projects (more on those in another post), Grace Quintanilla was most fiercely proud of the community building she achieved with the youth and the disadvantaged who flocked to her Center for Digital Culture.  I still remember the images of how she mobilized the staff and facilities at the Center for Digital Culture to assist those harmed by the devastating 2017 earthquake in Mexico City.

What's truly tragic is that two figures most responsible for nurturing the development and exhibition of digital art and culture in Mexico both left this earth at very young ages.  So this week, I'll be sharing my love and admiration for Grace Quintanilla and always in the shadows, her mentor and curator, Priamo Lozada.

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 4/9/19, 8:51 PM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Ana Valdés" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of agora158 at gmail.com> wrote:

    ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------