New Photos of Old Mexico at the National Museum of Mexican Art
Carl Vogel
Published: July 21, 2009
On one wall is a large, elegant photo of a warm summer night in a bygone era, a black-and-white image of Guadalajara’s busy city square awash in the light of thousands of stringed bulbs. Across the room, another print captures a different set of lights in the dark, the lanterns of hundreds of women and children just as the dawn breaks on an island in Michoacán in an annual Day of the Dead ceremony.
Charles Townsend with his 8x10 camera, setting up to shoot a pyramid in Teotihuacan, Mexico, 1947.
National Museum of Mexican Art
The balance between the traditions of the past and the start of a new era is woven throughout “Journey into Mexico,” an photo exhibit now showing at the National Museum of Mexican Art through October 4, 2009. The dozens of black-and-white photos, taken from 1947 to 1955, illustrate a country transitioning into modern Mexico. The exhibit includes pictures of Baroque abandoned churches and ancient Toltec ruins that have since been restored, men on horseback, crowds gathered for local religious celebrations, the countryside around an abandoned silver mine.
An Important Time
The exhibit has an intriguing, almost hidden story, as well. The photographer, Charles Townsend, immigrated with his wife and eight-year-old son from Philadelphia to a quiet neighborhood in the outskirts of Guadalajara in 1947 to photograph Mexico and its people. He traveled around the country but was never able to make a living from his photography (in fact, the prints in the show have never before been exhibited), and he moved back to the U.S. after several years.
That eight-year-old boy, however, who grew up in Mexico, is Richard F. Townsend, a distinguished scholar of Mesoamerican art and artifacts and the chairman of the Department of African and Amerindian Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has taught for 22 years. Richard also is the curator for “Journey into Mexico,” and the images are both a witness to the history of Mexico and a personal chronicle of his formative years in the country.
“[My father] set out to photograph the country around our home, the farmers still working with a wooden plow, planting before the rainy season,” Townsend told an audience of more than 80 who attended an opening reception for the exhibit on the evening of July 10th. “But not all of Mexico was so embedded in the past. There was also a national project to form a modern nation underway.”
“The Richard Townsend connection makes this a really special exhibition. These are great photos of an old Mexico that doesn’t exist any more. And then there’s also the fact that the photographer is the father of a man who is really well-known and respected, especially in Mexico, for his knowledge of the indigenous art and rituals and architecture,” says Cesareo Moreno, the museum’s visual arts director and chief curator.
A Perfect Venue
The National Museum of Mexican Art, the only Latino museum accredited by the American Association of Museums, is the logical venue to house “Journey into Mexico.” In addition to a permanent collection of Mexican art that is one of the largest in the country, the museum has a rotating exhibit of crafts and art from up-and-coming Chicago artists and another gallery devoted to a wide variety of shows.
“We’ve had Mesoamerican art exhibits from ancient Mexico, art from colonial Mexico, contemporary art, folk art—anything that is made by Mexican artists this side of the border or across,” Moreno says. “Almost any working artist in Chicago of Mexican decent, we’ve had their work here at some point.”
Highlighted exhibits since the museum opened in 1987 include a show that traced 3,000 years of cultural roots from the pre-Cuauhtémoc period to today, a 20th century retrospective that included works by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and “The African Presence in Mexico,” which is currently on a five-year, international tour.
With a mission to showcase the beauty and richness of Mexican culture and to encourage the development of Mexican artists, the museum is also the nation’s leading and largest Latino arts organization. It’s nationally recognized for innovative and bilingual educational programming, including workshops and programs offered to more than 50,000 students annually, as well as two sponsoring two major performing arts festivals each year.
With all that going on, the museum continues to bring in new exhibits about three times a year to both of the rotating galleries. “In October, our next show is women artists who work with the women of Juarez, where a lot of women are moving up to the border to work and many have been murdered or disappear. It’s a group show, very contemporary and site-specific,” Moreno says. “We like to mix it up.”
Admission to the National Museum of Mexican Art is free. The museum is located at 1852 W. 19th Street and is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 am – 5 pm. For more information, call 312.738.1503.
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