More from the Hecho en Oaxaca exhibit…
The courtyard at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (MACO)…
Art is the tree of life. — William Blake
Posts Tagged ‘street art’
Art is the tree of life
Posted in Creativity, Culture, Exhibitions, Museums, Science & Nature, Travel & Tourism, tagged arts, Hecho en Oaxaca, MACO, Mexico, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Oaxaca, photographs, photos, street art, trees, urban art, William Blake quote on September 7, 2013| 4 Comments »
Rhu crew
Posted in Creativity, Culture, Travel & Tourism, tagged art, graffiti, Jorel, Mexico, Oaxaca, photographs, photos, Rhu Crew, street art, urban art, wall art on September 4, 2013| 2 Comments »
Work in progress on Tinoco y Palacios by Jorel and the Rhu Crew…
Up close and personal…
All finished!
Waiting…
Posted in Creativity, Culture, Exhibitions, Museums, Music, Travel & Tourism, tagged arts, Hecho en Oaxaca, MACO, Mexico, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Oaxaca, photographs, photos, street art, urban art, Waiting On The World To Change lyrics on August 21, 2013| 2 Comments »
Another wall, courtesy of the Hecho en Oaxaca urban art project of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (MACO). It reminds me of the John Mayer song,
Waiting on the World To Change
Me and all my friends
We’re all misunderstood
They say we stand for nothing and
There’s no way we ever could
Now we see everything that’s going wrong
With the world and those who lead it
We just feel like we don’t have the means
To rise above and beat it
So we keep waiting
Waiting on the world to change
We keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change
It’s hard to beat the system
When we’re standing at a distance
So we keep waiting
Waiting on the world to change
Now if we had the power
To bring our neighbors home from war
They would have never missed a Christmas
No more ribbons on their door
And when you trust your television
What you get is what you got
Cause when they own the information, oh
They can bend it all they want
That’s why we’re waiting
Waiting on the world to change
We keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change
It’s not that we don’t care,
We just know that the fight ain’t fair
So we keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change
And we’re still waiting
Waiting on the world to change
We keep on waiting waiting on the world to change
One day our generation
Is gonna rule the population
So we keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change
We keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change
~~~
But, then again, maybe he’s waiting to join the struggle to make the change…
Out of the street, into the museum!
Posted in Buildings, Creativity, Culture, Exhibitions, Travel & Tourism, tagged art, Dr Lakra, exhibitions, Hecho en Oaxaca, MACO, Mexico, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Museum of Contemporary of Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Retna, Saner, street art, Swoon, urban art, wall art, Yescka on July 18, 2013| 4 Comments »
Oaxaca is alive with street art these days — even more than usual and that’s saying a lot! As part of their Hecho en Oaxaca (Made in Oaxaca) exhibition, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca) invited a dozen well-known and accomplished urban artists to transform the walls of the museum and the Historic District of the city.
A lifetime ago, prior to becoming a librarian, I was a registered nurse, first working in a hospital and then as a visiting nurse. The current MACO exhibit reminded me of one of the primary reasons why I much preferred the latter — it was the creativity needed in creating treatment plans to provide care in a patient’s often-times challenging home environment.
The imagination and inventiveness required to create art on crumbling walls with windows, doors, meters, and electrical boxes, never ceases to amaze me. As you can see below, even in MACO, that same vision is evident in the use of the museum’s many rooms and courtyards — including incorporating doorways, window sills, and colonial era frescos.
Wall in Oaxaca’s Historic District
MACO
Pan Am restaurant on Matamoros
MACO
Porfirio Díaz at corner of Jesús Carranza
MACO
Calle Tinoco y Palacios
MACO
Mercado IV Centenario
MACO
If you love Oaxaca’s street art, get yourself to MACO. The exhibition runs through the first week of October 2013.
It’s a Colibrí galaxy
Posted in Animals, Creativity, Culture, Science & Nature, tagged Chiapas, Colibríes, hummingbird, Mexico, NASA photo, photo, photographs, popular travel destinations, San Cristóbal de las Casas, street art, The Hummingbird Galaxy, urban art, wall art on July 15, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Colibríes? I can’t resist!
Hummingbird from a wall in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas…
Hummingbird from a NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope photo…
Separated at birth? Cool article from Slate about this photo…
The Hummingbird Galaxy
By Phil Plait
I was pondering writing a longish post about the picture above, talking about what galaxies are, how they can physically collide, how their gravity can twist and distort their shapes into all sorts of weird things …
But seriously. That galaxy looks like a hummingbird.* What more do you need?
OK, you need a little more. For one, I’ve written quite a bit about how galaxy collisions happen, so you can read about how these work here and here. The two galaxies in this collision are called NGC 2936 (the blue birdie one) and NGC 2937 (the smaller cottonball one). Together they are known as Arp 142, named for an astronomer who observed weird, distorted galaxy pairs.They’re located about 300 million light-years from Earth.
Two things really stand out to me in this picture (besides a galaxy that looks like a flippin’ hummingbird). One is the long, delicate tendril of dark reddish dust exhumed from the previously spiral-shaped galaxy NGC 2936, flung into a long arc across tens of thousands of light-years of space. I wish we had more three-dimensional data here; I’d love to know what this structure really looks like from different angles. Since dust is very dark, it blocks light coming from behind it, so this tendril is in front of the hummingbird galaxy, or perhaps embedded in it.
The other thing is that the smaller galaxy seems to have survived this collision pretty well. The shape is only mildly distorted; you can see a bit of off-centered nature to the glow of stars around the core. I suspect its more compact nature has a lot to do with that; the stars are closer together, perhaps, and the overall gravity of all those stars helped it retain its shape.
And there is one other thing. These are two very different galaxies colliding! The ex-spiral galaxy is very blue, indicating lots of star formation happened recently. Young, massive stars are blue, and when galaxies collide, the gravitational interaction can cause huge clouds of gas to collapse and furiously form stars.
The other galaxy is yellower, indicating an older, more stable population—blue stars don’t live long, so a galaxy this color must not have formed stars in a long, long time. Billions of years, for sure. You can tell by looking that it doesn’t have much gas and dust in it, which fits; if it had, the collision would have stirred them up, and we’d see more blue stars there as well.
Note too that you can see a handful of far more distant galaxies in the picture. The ones to the lower right are red, which is most likely due to having their light absorbed and reddened by the dust in the hummingbird galaxy; that’s another thing interstellar dust does, much like dust and haze in the air can make a sunset look red.
All in all, there’s a lot going on in this image! The hummingbird shape makes me smile, and don’t get me wrong, it’s cool. But what you’re seeing here is far more than just a shape in the clouds; you are seeing a massive collision on a cosmic scale, the collective might of 100 billion suns, their gravity reaching out and twisting the shapes of these galaxies, stretching them like taffy, molding them like clay.
The Universe operates on the grandest of all scales, manipulating forces and energies far too large for us to grasp in our puny brains. Yet when it does so, it generates beauty and perhaps even amusement in those same brains. It helps us appreciate it and gives us another reason to want to. And, after a while, we really can begin to grasp what the Universe is telling us.
Maybe our brains aren’t so puny after all.
*Some folks say it looks like a penguin. I can see that, but it’s silly. I mean, c’mon, a galaxy shaped like a penguin? Ridiculous.
h/t Chris
Technicolor
Posted in Buildings, Creativity, Culture, Transportation, Travel & Tourism, Weather, tagged graffiti, Mexico, murals, Oaxaca, photographs, photos, popular travel destinations, rainy season, street art, urban art on July 7, 2013| 3 Comments »
Ahhh… I’m back in my new and improved Casita Colibrí. Friday night, with lightning flashing all around the Embraer, my fellow passengers and I bounced our way across Mexico and back to Oaxaca. Gracias, Hurricane Erick for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride! With appreciation and relief, spontaneous applause erupted when the little plane landed.
There have been many changes in the 7 weeks I’d been gone… Juan finished the screens on my doors and windows; they are beautifully made and not a single mosquito has been seen or heard! I left at the end of the dry season; golden-brown hills and fields and a constant coating of dust dulled nature’s and human-applied colors. I returned to the lush green hills and fields of the rainy season and the lustrous green leaves and red-orange blossoms of my African tulip trees.
And, new street art gleamed…
New art in courtyard of MACO.
New mural on Tinoco y Palacios.
New restaurant at 400 Matamoros.
Oaxaca in technicolor!
Xoxo, Oaxaca
Posted in Creativity, Travel & Tourism, tagged Mexico, Oaxaca, photographs, photos, street art, urban art, Xoxocotlán on July 5, 2013| 1 Comment »
Sanez, street rolling man
Posted in Creativity, Culture, People, Travel & Tourism, tagged art, artists, Gorilla Gallery, graffiti artists, Mexico, murals, Oaxaca, photographs, photos, Sanez, street art, urban art on June 10, 2013| 4 Comments »
One can see his art all over the city. I’d first been wowed by the scale, symbolism, and style of his work early last year, when walking up Matamoros to meet a friend who was staying at Hotel Azucenas. At Calle Prof. M. Aranda, I was stopped dead in my tracks — the entire front of the building next to the hotel had been transformed. Using a roller, not brush or spray can, the artist known as Sanez turned it into a work of art.
In September 2012, Sanez again worked his magic on this tired old building — this time creating “El Canto del Agua” (The Song of Water). According to the article, Mesoamerican Peoples Express their Solidarity by Jonathan Treat, using “symbols of the Aztec god of rain, fertility and water—Tláloc, and corn, forests, animals, campesinos and campesinos and traditional Oaxaca fiestas… Sánez honors indigenous peoples struggling to defend their territories: [The mural is] ‘Dedicated to the peoples who organize to defend their commons and the common good—Mexico and Canada.’”
Another close encounter with the work of Sanez occurred last month when I ventured across Republica into Barrio de Jalatlaco. Besides its un-city-like tranquility and quaint tree-lined, but treacherous, cobblestone streets, this bucolic neighborhood always has great street art. However, I didn’t expect to find the restaurant, Fuego y Sazón, playing host to the unmistakeable style of Sanez. Wow!
And then… Just a few days before this current trip to California, I was at Gorilla Gallery (Crespo 213) talking to Jason Pfohl (glass artist and guiding spirit behind Gorilla Glass) when Sanez came in. He came to discuss plans for his live painting on glass event at the gallery. Alas, I was already in the US on May 31, when it occurred. However, if you are currently in Oaxaca, you can see the finished piece at the gallery on Thursdays between 2 and 8 PM. Besides the immense glass canvas, the gallery is featuring prints by Sanez — and I’m sure Jason would be happy to discuss the distinctive tattoo work of Sanez.
In addition, you might want to slow down when driving along Constituyentes behind Mercado de Abastos — that giant billboard mural towering above the weeds and refuse is another of Sanez’s masterpieces.
I read the news today oh boy…
Posted in Creativity, Culture, Violence, tagged graffiti, Mexico, Oaxaca, photographs, photos, street art, urban art, wall art on May 21, 2013| 2 Comments »
A picture is worth 1000 words
Posted in Education, Environment, Signs, tagged environmentalism, Mexico, Oaxaca, photographs, photos, popular travel destinations, recycling, street art, Teotitlán del Valle, wall art on May 18, 2013| 1 Comment »
Never a dull wall in Oaxaca
Posted in Creativity, Culture, Travel & Tourism, tagged graffiti, Mexico, Oaxaca, photographs, photos, street art, street signs, urban art, wall art on May 9, 2013| Leave a Comment »
And now a return to the amazing street art from the walls near Calle de Melchor Ocampo and Calle de La Noria…
Never a dull moment or wall in Oaxaca!
Like a bird on a wire…
Posted in Creativity, Culture, Music, Travel & Tourism, tagged Bird On a Wire, graffiti, Leonard Cohen, Mexico, Oaxaca, photographs, photos, popular travel destinations, street art, urban art, wall art on April 15, 2013| 4 Comments »
More from the wall art at Calle Melchor Ocampo and La Noria. I can’t help thinking of Leonard Cohen’s, Bird on a Wire.
Like a bird on a wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
I scream 4 ice cream
Posted in Creativity, Culture, Weather, tagged graffiti, Mexico, Oaxaca, photographs, photos, street art, urban art, wall art on March 13, 2013| 4 Comments »
It may be March, but Oaxaca is doing May weather — daytime temperatures in the high 80s/low 90s and the nights are sheets only.
I scream, you scream…
Even the walls scream for ice cream!
Holding up half the sky
Posted in Buildings, Creativity, Culture, Holidays, Travel & Tourism, tagged Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas, Día Internacional de la Mujer, International Women's Day, Mexico, murals, National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples, Oaxaca, photographs, photos, popular travel destinations, public art, street art, urban art on March 8, 2013| 1 Comment »
Today is International Women’s Day…
Mural on the wall outside the Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas, Delegación Oaxaca, on Heroico Colegio Militar in Col. Reforma.
¡Feliz el Día Internacional de la Mujer!
Shadows on the wall
Posted in Creativity, Culture, Signs, Travel & Tourism, tagged graffiti, Mexico, Oaxaca, photographs, photos, street art, street signs, urban art, wall art on March 6, 2013| 4 Comments »
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