Southern Exposure Surpasses $1 million in Grants to Bay Area Arts Groups this Year.
by the El Reportero‘s news services
Southern Exposure is proud to announce the grant recipients of Round 15 of our Alternative Exposure Grant Program. Alternative Exposure grants fund the unincorporated, independent work of artists and collaboratives who invigorate and transform the San Francisco Bay Area arts community.
This year, we are granting a total of $60,000 to 14 projects, each receiving an award of $4,285. To date, Southern Exposure has awarded a total of $1,012,400 to 312 artists and projects, an enormous milestone for this project, thanks to major support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
One of the fortunate grantees, is Alex Mejía, a doctoral candidate in the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE) program at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.
His research interests are centered on language, identity, social interaction, immigration/diaspora, racialization, and labor/capital. In addition to language and education research, Alex engages in multimedia art practices including video art, sound art, performance, and documentary film.
Puebla’s Dia de Muertos parade this year harkens to holiday’s Mexica roots
Event acknowledged Day of the Dead’s start in an ancient Nahua feast period
Day of the Dead — celebrated in modern times on November 1 and 2 — is based on ancient indigenous ceremonies that, at least in the Mexica or Aztec civilization, may have lasted for as long as two months.
This year, some residents of Puebla city decided that they wanted to put on a Catrina parade that would acknowledge the holiday’s beginnings in those ceremonies.
In one of the Mexicas’ two calendars, a religious calendar called the xiuhpohualli, Miccailhuitontli was the Mexica period of “the little feast of the dead,” which was a preparation for Huey Miccaílhuitl, “the great feast of the dead.”
The celebration of Miccailhuitontli has mostly been lost in Mexico, but a group in the city of Puebla decided to bring it back.
“In pre-Hispanic cultures, Day of the Dead began in what we would consider the month of September,” Esther Cortés Rojas, the co-coordinator of the Puebla event, said.
She and José Velázquez Guevara, the other coordinator, decided to celebrate Miccailhuitontli with workshops and a Catrina parade at the Taller Estudio de la Cura, an art school in the city.
“This is the first time we presented it,” Velázquez said. “This marks for us the beginning of Day of the Dead. We want people to understand this.”
The day began with a Mexica ritual.
“We ask for permission to have this ceremony. We perform a ritual to the four points,” Víctor Carreto Cabaños, the ritual’s leader, said.
The four points refer to both the four cardinal directions as well as the four elements that were important to the Mexica: earth, wind, fire and water.
To open the ceremony, Carreto chanted and hit a small drum while three assistants purified the space with incense. He explained that the ritual isn’t to ask permission from a god.
“In [the indigenous language of] Náhuatl, there is no word for god,” he said. “We believe in energy, the energy that is the universe.”
Organizers held workshops where attendees learned about the cempasúchil (Mexican marigold — the iconic Day of the Dead flower) and the role of cacao in indigenous cultures. They also got to make skulls out of amaranth.
But the highlight of the day was the Catrina parade.
Catrina is the iconic Day of the Dead figure, based on a 1910 etching by José Guadalupe Posada, popularized by a later work of Diego Rivera.
The figure, as intended by Posada, pokes fun at Mexicans who imitated European styles during the era of President Porfirio Díaz, known as the Porfiriato. The Catrina also pokes fun at death.
It takes time and patience to transform a person into a Catrina.
