The RipOff Artists are already thinking about their 2018 challenge! This local multimedia collective chooses a different dead artist each year to “rip off” in weaving, digital media, collage, quilting, felting, woodworking, encaustic, and a variety of painting and three-dimensional media.
They’ll be breaking barriers and tearing down walls by emulating Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991) and his piece “Tres Personajes Cantando” (Three persons singing). Watch for news of their Summer Studio week at the Quail’s Nest Arts Centre.
You can expect lots of colour and music!
Marion Trimble, collage and acrylics artist, provides some background:
Rufino Tamayo was a Mexican painter and printmaker known for his large-scale murals and vivid use of color. Like Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco,
Tamayo helped garner international attention for Mexican art. Influenced by his pre-Columbian heritage as well as Cubism and Surrealism, Tamayo portrayed vernacular subjects like watermelons and animals in a unique formal vocabulary.
“Art is a means of expression that must be understood by everybody, everywhere,” he stated.
“It grows out of the earth, the textures of our lives, and our experience.”
Born on August 26, 1899 in Oaxaca, Mexico, Tamayo left the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts after a year and began to teach himself. He moved to New York in the 1930s after having a falling out with the politically driven Rivera and Siqueiros in his home county.
Eventually returning to Mexico in 1959, he founded the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City and the Museo Rufino Tamayo in his birthplace of Oaxaca during the early 1980s. The artist continued to produce some of his most compelling works including Moon and Sun (1990) right up until his death on June 24, 1991 in Mexico City, Mexico at the age of 91. Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, among others.
Marlene Kearsley
From Spain to Mexico and back to Canada, Flamenco Rosario invites audiences on a global voyage through dance. This April on the Frank Venables Theatre Stage the rhythm and song, hand-clapping and sweeping movements of “La Monarca” will be a unique experience.
