Through Friday, visitors to the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center’s Latino Bookstore Community Gallery can still catch the artwork of printmaker Celeste de Luna and painter Chris Escobar.
Their work accompanies the Life and Death on the Border 1910-1920 traveling exhibit created by Refusing to Forget, a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to preserving knowledge of historical ethnic violence along the Texas-Mexico borderlands.
The Guadalupe Center’s executive director, Cristina Ballí, saw the Life and Death exhibit as an opportunity to bring in art by De Luna and Escobar, who have both lived on the border, to bring currency to historical concerns.
“We’re a multi-disciplinary organization and we couldn’t help but want to showcase the artistic work that is reflecting the same themes,” Ballí said.
Sunflowers and windmills
De Luna was born in Illinois, though her parents are from the borderlands and the family moved back to the Rio Grande Valley when she was eight years old. Having lived in both places has allowed her a better understanding of multiple perspectives on border migration.
People living in the northern part of the country might not be aware of how diverse attitudes of borderlands residents can be, or how cultural heritage, traditions and mythologies transcend the border, she said.
De Luna’s woodblock print Sunflowers and Windmills is a complex layering of cultural references, from 1990s indie band They Might be Giants — which took its name from the epic Spanish novel Don Quixote — to the infamous windmills of that same novel that were targets of the antihero’s quixotic quest.
The folk saint Santisima Muerte is central in the image, wearing a slatted border wall crown, with blimplike surveillance drones hovering in the background. On the haunting figure’s robe are the words “They Might be Nothing.”
The image is De Luna “trying to put together old myths with new technology,” she said. “I’m really trying to make sense of it myself.”
Working the fields
Like De Luna, Escobar was born elsewhere — in his case in Brigham City, Utah, where his parents were harvesting in the fields as migrant workers — but he grew up in Del Rio.
As a youth, he worked in the fields alongside his parents in the Rio Grande Valley, and the mountains and fields of the border landscape tend to bubble up as he works intuitively to create new colored pencil and pastel drawings and paintings.
Escobar considered his visual work to be storytelling, “about experiences, good and bad” of Mexican American culture.
His images include the vaqueros and hard-working migrants populating the region, their music and dancing celebrations and the nightlong fiestas that were a regular feature of ranch life.
The Life and Death on the Border exhibit featuring De Luna and Escobar opened in November and will be on display at the Latino Bookstore Community Gallery through May 31. Admission to the bookstore is free.
