http://www.joshtfranco.com/work daily 0.75 2025-11-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1453048576142-LWC0GEGM0XTH9ED7FPBT/IMG_4938.jpg ART - Impurity takes huevos y reading con cariño (for María Lugones) "Voy a empezar en español y en la cocina. Two uses of the verb separar. El primer sentido. Voy a separar la yema de la clara, separar un huevo. I will separate the white from the yolk. I will separate an egg. I crack the egg and I now slide the white onto one half of the shell and I place the egg white in a bowl. I repeat the operation till I have separated all of the egg white from the yolk. Si la operación no ha sido exitosa, entonces queda un poquito de yema en la clara. If the operation has not been successful, a bit of the yolk stains the white. I wish I could begin with another egg, but that is a waste, as I was taught. So I must try to lift all the yolk from the white with a spoon, a process that is tedious and hardly ever entirely successful. The intention is to separate, first cleanly and then, in case of failure, a bit messily, the white from the yolk, to split the egg into two parts as cleanly as one can. This is an exercise in purity." María Lugones, 'Purity, Impurity, and Separation'   Haciendo mayonesa, so begins one of the many essays authored by Lugones and revisited frequently by the artists and many throughout the world. Here the text is activated by a full and faithful re-inscription on cascarones. They are filled with silver glitter, sealed with gold; who will dare to follow tradition and shatter one on the skull of a friend? The cascarones, nestled in their twelve foot long carton, are underscored by a plaster "long egg," a Danish innovation in food production. Videos exploring both traditions are included here. This project is in gratitude to Lugones: Thank you. It takes huevos to be impure. But huevos are fragile and one must read carefully.   Lugones, Maria. 1994. “Purity, Impurity, and Separation”. Signs 19 (2). University of Chicago Press: 458–79. Image: Josh T Franco, cascaron transcription in process, detail of page-to-egg numbering system. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1468083962908-O8YW3CRFULUKHPDG8E3L/IMG_3201.JPG ART https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1468083992674-8S23L7RAZE15QF8X1YPK/IMG_4121.JPG ART https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1480003457646-Z7TK5BIUW07O1L3N75ZP/Balsiger_Saunders.jpg ART - IN TLILLI IN TLAPALLI: THREE TEJANOS IN RED AND BLACK (OTRA VEZ) ORIGINAL INVITATION: Hi Y'all, I am an art historian. Since 2009, I have committed to making and exhibiting one new work a year. This is my own experience of what it's like to make, to craft, to be on the pointy end of the writer's pen. I am a Texan. I am in love with other Texans, even when it's difficult. Two Texans central to my own Tejanismo: Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Donald Judd. My new work this year is for them. It's called: in tlilli in tlapalli: three Tejanos in red and black (otra vez) Who is the third Tejano? That's y'all! This is an invitation to come sit, meditate, and tell your Texan story. How? Let's call it Tarot Tejano (you’ll see). Through their writings, Anzaldúa and Judd might be present, doing their ancestral thing, watching over you as you work. There will be Topo Chico. WHO La Gloria, El Jefe Don, y Uds. WHAT in tlilli in tlapalli... is part of the group show Dead Lands, Karkaot Mawat,* curated by Rotem Rozental WHEN Friday, April 15 7–9 p WHERE NurtureArt Gallery, 56 Bogart St, Brooklyn, NY 11206 Let us know if y'all are coming, for Topo Chico purposes. Big ol' Abrazos, Love, Josh   *Dead Lands artists: Michal Bar-Or, Aissa Deebi, Assaf Evron, Josh T. Franco, Dor Guez, Gaston ZviIckowicz, Yaron Lapid, Metehan Oscan, Alonah Rodeh   IMAGE: Chris Balsiger and Joshua Saunders, untitled collage, 2014 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1399718597113-4OGTR2VM0R01MD1HINIK/Screen+Shot+2014-05-09+at+11.49.56+AM.png ART - Cultivo de babosas / Slugs' Garden While researching Andean dance, Fabian Barba and Esteban Donoso felt trapped by its visual force. As if blinded, they were tempted to overlook their own lack of comprehension about that culture. Trying to escape the danger of falling into an exotifying gaze, they closed their eyes and set out to devise mechanisms that purposely escape the pitfalls of visuality. Slugs' Garden is an immersive space for tactile contemplation. It's a habitat to be calmly dwelled in, a playground of subtle sensations. It’s an intimate context in which we can consider our relation to our surroundings - to other people and other objects - and let it morph, unintendedly. Slugs' Garden is also the time to let us experience minute events of seemingly no consequence. Have you ever surprised yourself playing with a piece of paper that your fingers found lying somewhere? This is the time to let those small gestures mushroom to the centre of our attention, and become the core events of a meaningless universe full of sense. Like a garden, it's a space to spend some quiet time, having nothing to do or think about in particular. This slugs' garden is there to be inhabited and to be played with; an exploration of the space, an experience of time. It's to wear no shoes. It's where things grow. It's when we cultivate our interest on insignificant incidents. Here we don't walk, we don't skip. Here we take the time to touch our environment, and to caress it, centimeter by centimeter. We slide through it slowly, with no specific intention, wandering without plans, having no goal to achieve. It is a time we take to grow into slugs. It's a slug farm. It's a slug culture. See more https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1590334569184-5F0UUKX9WL3M2RG9GV3E/AEB12F4B-42CA-4D73-9B61-74DB66930941.jpg ART https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1603148407139-SLB5NH01HQ7MD5SIIT35/website+size+8.jpg ART https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1603144185797-2R6GEG73JQHJIQW49BAH/20190219_2019.02.20.RES101Process._untitled%2Bshoot_682.jpg ART - PICTURES ELSEWHERE | “Arts are positional games and each time an artist is influenced he rewrites his art’s history a little.” (for Michael Baxandall and Sylvia Gray) This project was made possible by the Southern Constellations Fellowship at Elsewhere Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina. Residence took place February 2019. PICTURES ELSEWHERE considers the pivotal art historian Michael Baxandall's methodology alongside the material legacy reinterpreted by all Elsewherians, the space and materials ultimately passed down from proprietress Sylvia Gray. This resulted in three new works: a performance for video, a book, and a live performance. To explore further, visit Elsewhere Museum’s website here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1399753970391-BBDRBTK4B4ZXM32HC6CO/photo-3.jpg ART Photo: Nerin Kadribegovic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1503081635071-FTVKJM9JAXA399DZC4W4/slugs.jpg ART - View from the garden photo: Koen Broos ...slugs’ garden is an immersive space for tactile contemplation. It’s a habitat to be calmly dwelled in, a playground of subtle sensations. It’s an intimate context where we can consider our relationship to our surroundings – other people and other objects – and let it morph, unintendedly. slugs’ garden is also the time to let us experience minute events of seemingly no consequence. Have you ever surprised yourself by fiddling with a piece of paper that your fingers found lying somewhere? This is the time to let those small gestures mushroom to the centre of our attention, and become the core events of a meaningless universe full of sense. Like a garden, it’s a space in which to spend some quiet time, having nothing in particular to do or to think about. This slugs’ garden is there to be inhabited and played with; an exploration of being in the space, an experience of time. It’s to wear no shoes. It’s where things grow. It’s when we cultivate our interest in insignificant incidents. Here, we don’t walk, we don’t skip. Here, we take the time to touch our environment and to caress it, detail by detail. We slide through it slowly, with no specific intention, wandering without plans, with no goal to achieve. It is the time we take to grow into slugs. ... - Fabián Barba & Esteban Donoso See full statement and more info here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1604425591693-NONDR488JSI98T1WLOTT/Wayfinding.Franco.07.jpg ART - SNAKE ATLAS (serpent lightning leads to water; for my father who was bitten, so the rattler also resides in me) SNAKE ATLAS was commissioned by Addison Gallery of American Art and included in the exhibition Wayfinding: Contemporary Artists, Critical Dialogues, and the Sidney R. Knafel Map Collection (October 17, 2020 - February 28, 2021) curated by Allison Kemmerer and Stephanie Sparling Williams. See full description of Wayfinding here. Music for SNAKE ATLAS was created by Chad Turner, inspired by a camping trip with Josh in Far West Texas. These five original tracks (on loop in the gallery) can be heard here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1658074808546-VGBX3IXXU6QEKGSWX2HL/dsc00951_52149456030_o.jpg ART - Stone Resting on Georgia O'Keeffe (Their sky fell to the sound of laughter.), 2021 - 2022 Commissioned by 516 ARTS and Artist Lab: Art Meets History in New Mexico, for Art Meets History: Technologies of the Spirit (June - September 2022) curated by Ric Kasini Kadour and Alicia Inez Guzmán, PhD. Curatorial statement: “Artists use their knowledge of a place to shape and inform other people’s understanding of it. Others often use artists and their legacy to construct a sense of place or to market a place to others. This is a type of social technology. In conversation with the O’Keeffe Museum, Josh T. Franco reflects critically on the legacy of artist Georgia O’Keeffe and invites the viewer to consider the artist’s influence on the cultural identity of New Mexico. Stone Resting on Georgia O’Keeffe (Their sky fell to the sound of laughter) cleaves the thoughtfulness of the artist’s longtime inhabitation of the area from the thoughtless consumption of her work and persona by contemporary audiences and cultural promoters.” IMAGE: photograph by Daniel Ulibarri, courtesy of 516 ARTS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1513529082797-QJ2RL14A7RZ4AY90SS5O/IMG_6344.jpg ART - Scriptorium con safos:, 2017- Scriptorium con safos: is a sculptural installation and ongoing performance series. It is a bibliographic and space-making project; books marking the space reference artworks on view nearby. The installation and opportunity to activate provide a means of studying works on view. Scriptoria can be activated by the artist, institutional staff, and anyone else who encounters it. Con safos - a Chicano term that signals solidarity, protection, and completion of a work of art. It typically appears abbreviated as “C/S” in paintings, murals, personal correspondence and a broad range of Chicano visual culture. In this performance, it serves two purposes: marking a physical space in which the artist or visitor can practice art history how they wish; protecting the body and signaling its freedom from art historical convention. Further information and documentation available on request. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1762548076104-2H3N05JEB6M8VELMHMP3/2024_Art_From_Yard_Installation_Views-31.jpg ART - Yard Art In 2024, I was Sachs Guest Curator at ICA Philadelphia. The resulting exhibition, Where I Learned to Look: Art From the Yard, was inspired by my grandfather’s yard and an observation: visual languages and strategies emerging from yard art appear in contemporary art practices in addition to their ongoing presence in actual yards across North America. As an artist, I took the guest curatorial appointment as an opportunity to create new work in conversation with others included in the group show. Those works are documented here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1762551684814-S6OH1DO85I29IL2SQ5KN/IMG_1655.jpeg ART - Leaving Marks, 2019 - 2023 Unframed color photographs Overall dimensions vary with installation Six parts: 19 1/5 x 25 3/5 inches each Photographed by Chad Ray Turner Image: Leaving Marks installed in Josh T Franco: PERSPECTIVA (seeing through stone), Davis Gallery, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, January 25-February 24, 2024 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1762553434593-PQRNQ62HHOYWD0N73Y43/26644BAE-03CA-4040-AF07-17A6BBDB63C2.jpeg ART - Watercolor Studies Today, art historians can capture an image on their phone in seconds. This tool has made it beyond easy to document museum, studio, and gallery visits. Once gathered, we can also zoom in on images and manipulate them in myriad other ways to facilitate our studies. Not so for previous generations. Until cameras, much less smartphones, advanced enough technologically to become adequate tools for capturing an artgoing experience, sketch and watercolor notebooks were the art historian’s ally in recording an image for later study. As an artist trained in art history, I employ this method of study to produce new works. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1399753478017-TM0SLI6FKL2TUSJJQ6FB/10155791_817380714943395_695181375_n.jpg ART https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1399490920621-TU6655V71SAGWASYDSRZ/Screen+Shot+2014-05-07+at+3.27.55+PM.png ART - Teléfono Piece (para las veteranas, con respeto y amor) with Natalie Goodnow DESCRIPTION A salvaged red payphone (as might be encountered on any urban street) mounted on a free-standing structure is on exhibit along with the other works in the show. Artists will be out of view behind the structure. They will also have a telephone (style unimportant). The mounted phone in the booth is wired to directly call the artist’s phone when picked up. Immediately when picked up, the artist will begin reciting a letter to Anzaldúa. These letters are sourced from the many personal correspondences available in the Anzaldúa archive at UT Austin’s Benson Library. Attendees are welcome to pick up the phone at any point during the opening of the exhibition. BACKGROUND Since it’s opening, I (Franco) have spent a significant amount of time with the Anzaldúa papers at UT Austin’s Benson Library. Every visit, I am eventually drawn back to the personal letters between Anzaldúa and the many people she was connected to through her multivalent works. Some are perfunctory or warmly professional. Others are intimate, in both light and deep tones. They are all fascinating for their own particular reasons. What struck me during my most recent visit is a common thread through nearly every one: geography. If one created a map of the Americas using as reference the many locales mentioned in the letters—“I am writing from El Paso. I just arrived from Califas. You’re in Brooklyn now, correct? O still in Bay Area? Anyway, see you at the conference in Chicago I hope.” [paraphrased] And so on—the result would be an overwhelming image system of lines crossing the hemispheres wildly, the US most densely. This distance seems to result from the nature of activist and intellectual institutionalization in the US. How many of us who engage Anzaldúa’s work are far from where we began geographically in the pursuit of our academic, intellectual, political, and cultural work? The telephone is meant to play on this distance, in order to both echo Anzaldúa’s and her colleagues’ experiences, as well as to probe the persistence of this wildly dispersed geography into today. It is a chance for Chicanas, Chicanos, People of Color, and other potential “protean beings” to investigate this ever present and pragmatic dimension of our lives and its bearing on our processes of becoming. In hearing the letters addressed directly to Anzaldúa, I hope to raise new questions. First by presenting this formerly unavailable material from the recently established archive, and second, by putting the participant in the position of Anzaldúa herself, within the network that now holds many of these archived figures as respected veteranas y veteranos, our guides, teachers, and foundations. This includes Rudolfo Anaya, Norma Cantu, Norma Alarcon, Sandra Cisneros, Ruth Behar, Francisco Alarcon, and others. As suggested in the title, this work is inspired by Yoko Ono’s ‘Telephone Piece,’ hinting at her similar status of honored veteran for many. Like that work, it disrupts the white cube (physical and conceptual) of the exhibition space, as it also highlights the coevalness of Chicana/o activism in the US with “post‐war American art” (a euphemism that occludes the specificity of much of this work to a small number of metropoles, mainly New York City). Participants will also be encouraged to graffiti the piece, as might occur on the street, in order to mark their place literally. This encouragement will take the form of paint markers left in and around the phone, as well as two prominent, scrawled inscriptions made before the show by the artist: “La Gloria estaba aqui [Gloria was here]” and, less prominently, “Yoko was here.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1429996775637-5BBZWZNSUALGP2QDWKYP/4.JPG.jpeg ART - Rebozo [Man] in Nepantla In part, this project is a response to 'Huipiles: A Celebration' (Museo Alameda, 2007) and Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros and how through them I felt my being in Nepantla, an in-between space. As far as ‘Huipiles’ is concerned, I am responding to the formula (Chicano/a) body + (Mexican) garment = meaning and to the feeling that I both am and am not (both to deeply felt degrees) part of the San Anto community that was present and/or invested in the show, its controversies, and the debates that surround(ed) them. Reading Caramelo, I felt my own fluctuations between intense identification with moments in the novel—having intimate knowledge of particular smells, colors, scenes, etc.— and a ghostliness (or "ghostly subjectivity" as María Lugones puts it), a being rendered suddenly ephemeral, an observant phantom, as I was written through moments of radical distance by Cisneros, of recognizing that any roots I might share with the experiences written are tenuous as best. In both, I felt my in-between-ness, possibly as Gloria Anzaldúa felt and wrote hers; between Chicano/a and gringo, Mexican and American, global and intimate, between sexual identities, between the available ways of speaking my body, even between understandings of fashion and utility. Nepantla is one name for these unnameable spaces. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1399492244805-2JL33E74S028WPB0AQBJ/Screen+Shot+2014-05-07+at+3.21.49+PM.png ART - in tlilli, in tlapalli: three tejanos in red and black *assisted by Maya Cueva. All photography and video by Cueva. “In tlilli, in tlapalli” is the Nahautl term signifying the red-and-black medium of the tlamatinime (the knowledge-producing class) in which their thought was recorded. Red-and-black figures explicitly in key essays by Donald Judd and Gloria Anzaldúa. Both evoke it in the context of indigenous Americans and the US Southwest as a territory. Judd cites the Hopi and Navajo and Anzaldúa “the shaman, [her] people,” understood as the Mexica. The pairing of red and black held spiritual, spatial, and visual significance for the indigenous, and consequently for Judd and Anzaldúa. Sandra Cisneros does not cite these indigenous traditions, but deploys “simple” colors (including red and black) to produce sensuality in her writing. She also shares a clear concern for reading the US Southwest against the grain of conventional histories and inhabitations alongside Judd and Anzaldúa. This project territorializes the three notable figures’ bodies as Tejano/a. They are included based on three factors: their philosophical explorations and political-aesthetic deployments of “red and black”; their conceptual and physical rootedness in Texas; and the role of their writings in my own conditions of possibility. Judd, Anzaldúa, and Cisneros each produce(d) substantial bodies of text. I am also interested in the inscription of these texts onto/as physical presences (bodies) and the space this might produce if presented together. One aim is that the co-presence of these three invokes a deterioration of borders between different aesthetic systems and their respective tribes who thrive in Texas: the art cognoscenti in whose cosmologies Judd is a central figure and the heavily overlapping worlds where Cisneros and Anzaldúa anchor different orbits. It is remarkable that these three reside(d) in Texas, located the region centrally in much of their thinking and creations, yet are frequently figured as alien to one another (Judd <--> Anzaldúa / Cisneros). Finally, I am interested in the intergenerational transmission of knowledges. This interest is embodied in the act of hand-transcribing works by these thinkers and including “glyphs” of the artist’s own making into the work.   Transcribed writings – Hand-transcriptions of the writings in which the authors mention red and/or black are mounted on materials reflecting the practice or spirit of the author: spiral notebook paper for Cisneros; sheet aluminum for Judd; heavy unruled drawing paper for Anzaldúa.   Height-specific plywood mounts – Each writing is mounted in rows and columns on plywood sheets measuring 4 feet wide. The height of each of the three mounts will be determined by the height of the writer whose work it holds. Judd’s is 6’, Anzaldua’s 4’10”, and Cisneros’s 5’7.” These lean against the wall.   Color scheme - Each plywood is colored differently for each writer: Anzaldua is red; Judd is unpainted, bare plywood; Cisneros is black.   Beeswax-coated “glyphs” – Using black and red acrylic paint pens and heavy drawing paper, the artist produced hundreds of pairs of “glyphs” of dimensions varying between 1” x 1” and 4” x 4.” The drawings’ shapes are mostly iterations of amorphous forms found in a range of art, from pre-colombian to modernist (Olmecs to Cy Twombly) filtered through the artist’s imagination. Each drawing is coated in beeswax, giving them an enhanced object-ness and a skin-like coating.   Tejano/a storytelling table - A small table with a red candle and an 8.5 x 11” lightbox is set up facing the three plywood text/body figures. Viewers are invited to sit at the desk, taking the position of Tlacuilo-Tlamatine (glyph maker- interpreter) and configure their own red-and-black story as Tejanos in the presences of Judd, Anzaldúa, and Cisneros. Insofar as glyphs (Nahuatl among them) have an historically tense relationship with the alphabetic writing deployed by Judd, Cisneros, and Anzaldúa, they are present in this work as my negotiation of two conflicting desires: to establish visually the notion that my intellectual, alphabetic work is forever indebted to these three, and to refrain from displaying any written work that is not that of the three main subjects. Less conflicted, they also make possible the artist’s invitation for others to produce stories alongside him and with or against the three authors. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/b557caea-1168-4dca-b80a-1c566e2583ca/IMG_2419.jpg ART - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/75bb8b51-026e-4728-baab-6f82bd84e2f0/Screen+Shot+2025-01-19+at+5.41.07+PM.jpg ART https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/8e1d9be6-e894-40cd-8171-f1756218a322/Screen+Shot+2025-01-19+at+5.41.07+PM.jpg ART http://www.joshtfranco.com/words daily 1.0 2025-11-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1485287559854-W35XJGEQ4RIAWJGX8PBF/pntg-sau.006532b.jpg WORDS - POSED-MINIMALISM Minimalism never was. It was posed by critics and gallerists, dealers and fans, collectors and art historians. Not many artists. But where is the line between something posed over and over again and something…real? Joshua Saunders strikes the pose in these works. Or, the force of art history makes us see him in this posture, supported as this current endeavor is by non-art materials (climbing grips, carabiners, rope) and industrial paints (auto body shell coat). So-called Minimalist hallmarks. The following notes, grips on the craggy wall of art history, rehearse the travesty: mis-associations and reductions around a “look” whose characteristics are now identified in realms far beyond art. Of the artists cited, some are living, some deceased, but all, at this point, are established art elders. Each has been posed at some point or another as Minimalist. None have worn it comfortably. If they did, they wouldn’t be great artists. Here, Saunders ascends, making his own way up and out of dumb labels. He’s no poser.   The full writing is included in the catalog ROCK CANDY available here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1399720821524-IJAAPAE7J3EBFC11A0EP/215278385_640.jpg WORDS - Natalie Goodnow Eagle Woman Poems, Co-Lab Project Space, July 2011 Photo by Alberto Jimenez Natalie Goodnow is a nationally recognized teatrista, teaching artist, and cultural activist from Austin, Texas. She performs, directs, and writes; she's been practicing some combination of these forms for seventeen years, and began teaching about and through them 8 years ago. She specializes in the creation of original works of performance, as a solo artist and also in collaboration with other performers and writers, both youth and adults. Goodnow explores the relationships between people and places, in terms of relationships to community, to the Earth, and to our own bodies. Her work asks tricky questions, and probes tough contradictions. Natalie's solo play "Mud Offerings" is the 2011 winner of the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award, and has been presented nationally at festivals and conferences in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C., and throughout Texas. She is an Artistic Associate of Theatre Action Project and a member of The Austin Project. See her website and/or blog for more:www.nataliegoodnow.com, makinggoodnow.blogspot.com Interview by Josh T Franco Your work brings up questions of tradition in contemporary settings. But even stating it like that, I’ve already fallen into one of the traps I think you’re trying to avoid: tradition isn’t “back there”, but neither is it the same today, for most, as it was a hundred years ago, or a thousand for that matter. I should say the traditions I’m talking about are both pre-colonial indigenous American ones and post-colonial Catholic ones. And in your work, all of them are radically questioned through Chicanaand Women of Color feminist frameworks. At the same time, there’s clearly a deep reverence. But what exactly is the nature of this reverence, as it is far from typical? Hmmm... ok. Well. I’ve been thinking about what it means to be indigenous. And whatindigeneity means, or could mean. And although one response might be to reproduce everything that was a thousand years ago, in the here and now, or to try to do so (because of course it isn’t quite possible to really reproduce what was, nor would we necessarily want to), I’d like to try another definition of indigeneity on for size. Let’s say it’s this: to live in relationship with the land, in the here and now. That means that, as a Chicana in central Texas, although I believe that the lessons of the Mexica (what the Aztec called themselves) are incredibly important, it’s a little silly for me to really and truly try and apply them directly to my life, without any critical examinations or alterations. And this is partly because there are lots of ways in which the Mexica society was just as flawed as any other (patriarchal, militaristic, imperialistic), and also because the Mexica weren’t really living in relationship with the land that I’m at now. They were nearby, if we consider this on a global scale, but still not quite here. However, all that being said (and I think this is where I start to actually answer your question), I still think that there is wisdom in tradition. Especially in the traditions of folks who, at one point in time, knew how to live with the land. We don’t know how to do that now. I’m not sure I even really need to explain why... The “go green” movement is so huge... “Avatar” was such a hit... it’s in the zeitgeist. Something has to change. The way we’re treating the earth isn’t working. It’s not working at all. And yet, in our histories, we find peoples and communities who were better at this than we are now. And it’s not just about reducing/reusing/recycling... it’s about the way we treat each other, the way we talk to one another... we create systems that abuse and misuse the Earth’s resources when we feel entitled, when we believe we have no obligation to share what we have. So, I take the things that I’ve learned with my contact with indigenous spiritual traditions seriously; reciprocity - no one should take without also giving. And, it sounds so simple, but, sharing - you don’t show up to an event with a bag full of snacks, or a thermos full of tea, and not offer some to everyone, even if all you’ve got is a little bit. And, you don’t assume that youhave the right to speak whenever you want, whatever you want, or even to know whatever you want, whenever you want. You must ask permission. You must acknowledge the knowledge of those who have come before you. That all may seem very distinct from “environmental” concerns, but I don’t think it is. Our elders have been here. They know how to live in harmony with all that has also been here. I think if we had all adopted, or, remembered to honor these sorts of values a long time ago, we wouldn’t be in the pickle we’re in now. And, all that being said, let me just acknowledge out loud/in print, that everything I’ve just said is very hard to do, and I struggle with it constantly in my everyday life. Read more https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1500640600166-6B11KXHWWFD8N6P3ZDL4/9781477308707.jpg WORDS - Book review: Stephanie Sauer, The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force condenses the work of two collectives: The Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) and Con Sapos Archaeological Collective.1 The former is also sometimes cited as "César Chávez's Air Force" for the close work they did organizing and generating images on behalf of the United Farm Workers. An "Index Note" from author Stephanie Sauer describes RCAF as the "Best Unknown World-Renowned Local Artists."2 Con Sapos' mission is to document "history in the Americas as it happens."3 They use techniques "indigenous to this continent, as well as those introduced by European archivists."4 Quetzalcoatl serves as head of their advisory board, it is drily stated. Yes, Quetzalcoatl, the Mesoamerican feathered-serpent deity associated with Aztec culture, an early sign of what's in store as the book unfolds. RCAF generates spoken cuentos, material castoffs, casual and conflicting chismes and heavy images. Con Sapos gathers and orders these materials. What constitutes "order" here is likely at odds with most readers' assumptions. For instance, I dare readers to discern which pieces of material evidence presented in the book are actually from sites of RCAF activity, and which are fabricated by Con Sapos in their practice of tlacuiloismo, the approach to history pioneered by Quetzalcoatl, we are told. Tlacuiloismo takes its name from the Nahuatl word, tlacuilo, translating roughly to "sage," the seer and crafter of knowledge. The shift from recording to crafting history is key. As a curator for the largest institutional archive for primary source documents related to American art, I had to relinquish some deeply held notions of order to keep turning the page. As a thirty-something Chicanx, I felt utterly at home in this art history. ...   Read the full review here.   The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force By Stephanie Sauer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. 131 pp. isbn 978-1-4773-0870-7 Diálogo, An Interdisciplinary Studies Journal, Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2017, pp. 199-201. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1522258761209-XNXL6C9VY6Y5T613QH3U/EAG-Blog-Spread-Essay.jpg WORDS - Roll Call A new class. Annually, the Joan Mitchell Foundation activates a knowledgeable network of nominators and judges to determine how to disburse the substantial resources it devotes to grants for individual artists. Each grant becomes a collaboration over the years, as the Foundation’s rare programming engages artists at every stage of their careers; in three, four, five decades, the same “emerging” artists featured in this catalogue may participate in the Creating A Living Legacy (CALL) program in order to organize and inventory their creative work in retrospect. They may also participate in residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, or consult with experts vetted by the Foundation for professional, economic, and institutional guidance. Each artist, in turn, opens the Foundation to new geographies, new materials, new historical positions, “newness” writ large. One day, it could be enlightening to survey and contextualize the varied practices of all the artists supported by the Foundation—as even the generous grande dame herself, Joan Mitchell, surely could not have predicted the myriad fruits of her gift. For now, I offer the following as a primer for Mitchell, to catch her up on the most recent beneficiaries of her legacy—a roll call for the honorary headmistress of a new class... Read the full essay here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1525368803422-9VN42XCH8LCRBS9NN55B/IMG_5653.JPG WORDS - THEASTER GATES: HOW TO BUILD A HOUSE MUSEUM Catalogue published after the occasion of: THEASTER GATES: HOW TO BUILD A HOUSE MUSEUM July 21, 2016 – October 30, 2016 EXHIBITION OVERVIEW Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates takes over the fifth floor of the AGO’s Contemporary Tower with an immersive exhibition exploring the potential of the house museum—historically important landmarks that have been transformed into legacy sites. Gates proposes new ways of honouring and remembering Black experience and explores the potential of these spaces through music, dance, video, sculpture and painting. Organized as a world of symbolic structures and their associated objects, the exhibition is dedicated to Black luminaries including George Black, Frankie Knuckles and Muddy Waters. How to Build a House Museum invites visitors to tour the house museum in its many possible forms: as an architectural monument, historical representation, or site of freedom. Curated by Kitty Scott, the AGO’s Carol and Morton Rapp Curator, Modern & Contemporary Art, this exhibition marks Gates' first major solo exhibition in Canada, and reflects the AGO’s ongoing engagement with contemporary art and commitment to working with living artists. More info here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1540996695064-O76SGUE3IZ1BTNB9C0AG/AAA-AAA_sancemil_2565.jpg WORDS - Hispanic Hoopla: Latino Collecting at the Archives ABSTRACT: The Archives of American Art has collected primary sources that document the contributions of Latinos to the visual arts in the US since its founding in 1954. Both independently and with support from the Latino Center, the Archives’ permanent staff and a network of expert associates have conducted and collected dozens of oral histories of Latino artists, scholars, collectors, and curators in California, Texas, and Southern Florida since the mid-1990s. In 2015, I inherited a collection rich in Latino content on which I continue to build, now in the role of the Archives’ national collector. Some of the documents highlighted in this essay derive from acquisitions that predate my tenure at the Archives, while others entered the collection over the course of the two-year Latino collecting initiative I oversaw from 2015 to 2017. A common thread runs through each example: evidence that Latino art is integral to the story of American art. The Archives’ Latino holdings not only add quantitatively to the histories of American art legitimized at a national level by their presence at the Smithsonian, but also alter fundamentally the terms and categories we use in defining the field. Read full essay here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1590152742233-V6AK8B5247R15UFQ8W77/FIG+1.jpg WORDS - There Are No Amateurs in Far West Texas ABSTRACT: This article explores notions of amateurism in relation to story-gathering, primary source classification, and other archival practices. Particularly, the author’s path to his role as National Collector at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art is traced from his familial, art historical and intellectual roots in West Texas. Arguing that cultures of West Texas place an exceptionally high value on retaining and generating stories particular to the region’s history, Franco points to examples from archaeology, Texas history, art history, and contemporary art. Substantial scholarly work has been committed to the complex relationships between professional fine artists and untrained outsiders. Franco takes methods from these explorations in order to approach the equally complex relationship between professional state-sponsored archival practices and similar endeavors undertaken by individuals and smaller, homegrown archival projects from a specific American region. See the full essay here. IMAGE: Title page of author’s copy of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: Eleventh Edition https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1412169141771-TEZ7R1DLNUFQ8KA6MZ1J/mail.cgi.jpeg WORDS - Crip / Blood Domy Books Austin, Texas January 14 - March 1, 2012 The work of Joshua Saunders often begins from a contradiction. It foregrounds elements that prove incendiary within the threadbare discourses of race, sex, gender, and violence. But this foregrounding is backed by the artist’s intense desire to get them out of the way. He does not want to talk about them. Asked whether or not his work has a place in these conversations, he is evasive. “The work is (about) humor.” This complicated stance exposes the train of concerns the viewer brings on her own. What makes her laugh? What makes her angry? What does and does not make sense to her modes of perception? One does not look at Saunders’ work but reaches around it, back at herself, clasping her own hand. In doing so, she’s surprised to find herself embracing, in this particular show, a cripped out puppy or a steamrolled Michael Jordan. Crip/Blood is no less punchy than anything the artist has done before, but it is perhaps his most concentrated meditation thus far. This concentration accesses a distinction not thought about enough: what is the difference between a community and a mass? How does what started in Compton in ’69 amongst a definable, interrelated, if highly conflictive, group become currency for a heterogeneous zoo of characters—from rich white boys to barrio youth—who happen to drink from the same mass media watering holes? What is it that they all find sustaining and seductive? Who produces who? In responding to these questions, the artist relentlessly obliterates and reinscribes a battery of oppositional pairings, all the while irreverent of any difference between the formal and the social: red/blue, black/white, black/black, East Coast/West Coast, playground/street, hard/soft, uncouth/genteel, isolated/disseminated, and of course, Crip/Blood. This final pair is currently one of the mass’s fullest and emptiest signifiers, the artist seems to be saying. They are no longer even words, but icons. Crip and Blood are no longer text, but image—one amidst a myriad reflected in the surfaces of our respective watering holes. Slurp slurp Slurpee. Josh T Franco   Austinist Interview (More about the Slurpee machine…) Austin Chronicle review by Andy Campbell Franco   Image: Joshua Saunders, Michael Jordan, 2011 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1590328568652-VZUBB2U6U5ZSS9I282MC/FTM+Instasquare.jpg WORDS - From the Margins WASHINGTON DC - 2019 marks thirty years since the cancellation of The Perfect Moment: Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. And in this new perfect moment, this appealing anniversary wrapped neatly in black and white, it is easy to draw a line directly from the present back to one point in the past. However, when time is compressed as such, what happens to the in-between? From the Margins aims to examine the foreclosure presented by Mapplethorpe’s legacy by pivoting towards Glenn Ligon’s response to Mapplethorpe. In this way, Ligon’s Notes On the Margins of the Black Book serves as a guide to generating critique. In Ligon’s incisive work, photographs from Mapplethorpe’s infamous Black Book are paired with texts taken from writers such as Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as quotes from everyday patrons to New York City bars and clubs. In his response to Mapplethorpe, Ligon reveals the inextricability of identity, race, sex, history, and politics. From the Margins views Ligon’s work as critique, but more specifically critique as care. Works on view such as Naima Green’s Pur·suit updates Catherine Opie’s Dyke Deck to better reflect the lived queer experience of today, with 54 card-sized portraits of queer womxn, trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people. Stanley Stellar, whose acclaimed photographs of New York City men spanning over four decades, continues to capture vulnerability and sensuality in all their endless manifestations. From the Margins speaks to the function of critique, the authority of public reception, and the spectacularization of an artist into a mythos. Critique is presented without the condemnation of finality but rather as a form of care and collaboration. How can we better understand the history of representation when we re-examine Mapplethorpe’s position? The artists in the show both take up and refuse Mapplethorpe’s ethos in the service of making space. The exhibition considers the importance of filling in the gaps in our visual vocabulary, challenging the viewer to reconsider the legacy of representing those on the margins and the role of critique. In addition to the sixteen artists on view, From the Margins includes a resource library and a fully illustrated catalog with over ten contributors. Exhibiting Artists: Peter Clough, John Edmonds, Benjamin Fredrickson, Naima Green, Florian Hetz, Sara Lusitano, Carlos Motta, Matthew Papa, John Paradiso, Luis Alberto Rodriguez, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Stanley Stellar, Matt Storm, Gerardo Vizmanos, Shen Wei, and Shikeith. Resource Library: Raw Meat Collective, GenderFail, Kink Magazine, Aperture, Original Plumbing, Camilo Godoy/Amigxs, and Cakeboy Magazine. Catalog Contributors: Andy Johnson, Caitlin Chan, James Huckenpahler, Megan L. Weikel, Jessica Layton, Terence Washington, Che Gossett, Josh T Franco, Adriana Monsalve of Homie House Press, Aubrey T.A. Maslen, Martina Dodd, and Ravon Ruffin. See full exhibition info here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1590425417810-EB3YXRBPCEUH75RQIAEX/TF-LM22367+Vi%C3%B1ales+%28Reclining+Nude%29+%28LMG+2015+Inst%29+det02.jpg WORDS - American Rupestria: Teresita Fernández Introduction “The existing scholarship and criticism around Teresita Fernández’s work unpacks questions about landscape, place, colonization, the body, and wayfinding. Along these lines, the work has been placed in art history alongside predecessors such as Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, and Robert Morris. Many of these writings pay close attention to the nature of Fernández’s materials. They note the powerful relationship between graphite, gold, charcoal, and fire that Fernández intervenes in picturing landscapes, for instance. Yet far less attention has been given to the place of Fernández’s work in a line going back to the earliest known human marks, their makers, and their contexts, despite the affinity of their materials. There is room for more critical thinking around the non-art contexts invoked by her material choices, e.g., archaeology, geology and occultism. What does it mean for a contemporary artist to dedicate her practice to certain materials by choice that were also utilized by the earliest human artists by necessity and experimentation? How do Fernández’s experiments with rocks and mined matter to create images relate to theirs? What does unpacking this connection mean for art history? This interview is a first step in rectifying this absence in the conversation around Fernández’s work, and to address the persistent gap between archaeological and art historical concerns.” Read the interview here. IMAGE: Teresita Fernández, Viñales (Reclining Nude) (detail), 2015, Concrete, bronze, and malachite, 48 x 64 x 101 inches https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1612396000886-Z9B4ZINQ2EJKKVUGEL2L/IMG_4501.jpeg WORDS - A Questionnaire on Decolonization The prompt: “The term decolonize has gained a new life in recent art activism, as a radical challenge to the Eurocentrism of museums (in light of Native, Indigenous, and other epistemological perspectives) as well as in the museum's structural relation to violence (either in its ties to oligarchic trustees or to corporations engaged in the business of war or environmental depredation). In calling forth the mid-twentieth-century period of decolonization as its historical point of reference, the word's emphatic return is rhetorically powerful, and it corresponds to a parallel interest among scholars in a plural field of postcolonial or global modernisms. The exhortation to decolonize, however, is not uncontroversial-some believe it still carries a Eurocentric bias. Indeed, it has been proposed that, for the West, de-imperialization is perhaps even more urgent than decolonization. What does the term decolonize mean to you in your work in activism, criticism, art, and/or scholarship? Why has it come to play such an urgent role in the neoliberal West? How can we link it historically with the political history of decolonization, and how does it work to translate postcolonial theory into a critique of the neocolonial contemporary art world?” Respondents include Nana Adusei-Poku, Brook Andrew, Sampada Aranke, Ian Bethell-Bennett, Kader Attia, Andrea Carlson, Elise Y. Chagas, ISUMA, Iftikhar Dadi, Janet Dees, Nitasha Dhillon, Hannah Feldman, Josh T. Franco, David Garneau, Renee Green, Iman Issa, Arnold J. Kemp, Thomas Lax, Nancy Luxon, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Saloni Mathur, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Alan Michelson, Partha Mitter, Isabela Muci Barradas, Steven Nelson, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Alessandro Petti, Paulina Pineda, Christopher Pinney, Elizabeth Povinelli, Ryan Rice, Andrew Ross, Paul Chaat Smith, Nancy Spector, Francoise Verges, Rocio Zambrana, and Joseph R. Zordan. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1479911252986-N5J7TYJRD26G95V5GL65/attachment.jpg WORDS - MOSES ROS PAPERS "The projects documented in the Moses Ros Papers demonstrate how this artist of Dominican descent has negotiated African, African American, Latino, and Caribbean identities in his work. That negotiation takes place through language, sartorial mash-ups, and references to bachata music and dance. His art often features a figure wearing one sneaker and one sandal, simultaneously evok- ing the streets of New York and the beaches of the Dominican Republic. Two projects will be of particular interest to researchers investigating the history of African Americans in the United States: a sculpture dedicated to jazz musician Miles Davis, and a mural honoring literary polymath and early National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) executive James Weldon Johnson." See the full note in Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 55, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 95-97.   Image: Moses Ros, preparatory sketch for God's Trombones I, 1999. Colored pencil and ink on paper, 8 1/2 x 11 in. Moses Ros Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1636287085887-11LQ5M919DT6TRVW0ZUL/IMG_9163.jpeg WORDS - Felix Gonzalez-Torres: inbetweenness Published on the occasion of: Felix Gonzalez-Torres: inbetweenness Judd Foundation, 101 Spring Street October 22–December 18, 2021 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1509567077910-2BE27E5F10PEBWDGLOWR/Colectiva%21.jpg WORDS - Más Rudas Collective, 2009-2016 (An Archival Epilogue to an Epic Pachanga) "Archives are inheritances. Their fate can range from dusty boxed-up obscurity to spectacular consumption. This is up to the inheritors. The case is similar with the immaterial aspects of traditions. To commit the resources necessary for preserving documents and traditions alike is to wager their appeal and usefulness to younger and future generations. In what follows, I introduce the work of the San Antonio-based Más Rudas Collective (MRC), four inventive heirs of Chicana/o art and art history. The women of MRC take up symbols and traditions of their Mexican American context and fashion weapons against the limits imposed on them by preexisting meanings embedded therein. They also playfully recognize and resist postmodernist strains of Chicana/o art history and curation that respond to the same contexts. I will read MRC’s work through the archival documents in which this art lineage materializes in order to elaborate on the adept weaponization of entrenched traditions and culturally coded gender roles undertaken by these artists." See the full article in Journal of Feminist Scholarship, issue 12/13 (Spring/Fall 2017), pp. 38-53. IMAGE: Más Rudas Collective, Colectiva! (digital photograph, 2009) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1661200764194-7HN59BIF0GVM6DVNO9LC/Brown%2BNeon%2BCover%2B.jpg WORDS - Brown Neon: An Interview with Raquel Gutiérrez I was delighted when the email arrived. Subject line: “Gulf Coast Invitation to Interview Raquel Gutiérrez.” I had been hearing about Raquel for a while, mostly from mutual friends in Texas. I had scoped their website. Mira el “.net” and that technicolor drama three-quarter profile shot. That fade: so damn brown and cool. The knowing and inviting glance. It’s just a website homepage, but already you’re in Raquel’s world thanks to the power of portraiture. That’s one of the skills at which Gutiérrez is so adept: portraying. Read the interview here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1601807249231-5618NN2EPKQ5SX03I8EJ/IMG_0314.jpg WORDS - Marfa, Marfa: Rasquachismo and Minimalism in Far West Texas *forthcoming from Duke University Press This book focuses on Marfa, Texas. Within art history, Marfa is understood as the most developed example of Donald Judd’s standards for permanent installation of works. He moved there in 1972, and developed multiple sites in and around town as demonstrations of his “platinum-iridium standard” for how art should be displayed. Catalyzed by Judd’s presence, galleries, arts foundations, festivals, and independent studio practices have established themselves there. Marfa was established in the late 1800s as a railroad stop. Ranchers in the surrounding area used Marfa as a central location for sending cattle to market, socializing, and picking up supplies. The laborers who supported this industry and provided services in town are mostly of Mexican descent. Marfa was also a base in the off-season for many families who made a living as farmworkers, traveling west to California as the seasons dictated. The overarching project of this book can be framed by the aesthetic practices of these two groups. The names for these practices are Minimalism and rasquachismo. The former is rejected by those it names, and the latter is rarely named or considered as an object of contemplation in itself, but rather as a daily mode of living. Both are names devised by critics and intellectuals. Rather than stage a confrontation or attempt a translation, this book reads the situation through a “decolonial aesthetic” lens. What comprises decolonial aesthetics is a relatively new and open question for the collective project Modernity / Coloniality / Decoloniality (MCD). This is my contribution through a highly localized, specific consideration with implications for Chicano / a Studies and postwar art history. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1722787126764-1APM7VM28JLNNKPNLO7Y/Screen+Shot+2024-08-04+at+11.58.06+AM.png WORDS - Joy, Play and Resistance in the Work of Miguel Luciano & Hiram Maristany Catalogue for exhibition of same title (March 24 - May 14, 2022) Curated by Claire L. Kovacs https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1399723459758-LSSVGE47Z26R780PQ0UO/Blackwell_School_Anzaldua_quote_sm.jpg WORDS - Letter To Donald Judd ...We continue walking north and east. A few blocks and we are at the Blackwell School. Now a mostly inactive landmark, the school was historically where students of color in the area gained their education. Small and isolated as it is, Marfa experienced the same racial segregation in public education as did the rest of the country in the last century. Now it is a quasi-museum, and in large letters across the east facing exterior wall we see a quote in black florid script: “Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.” Beneath that a name: Gloria E. Anzaldúa. You know enough Spanish to understand the idea. Addressing the walker, the author tells us there are no bridges, but that we make them in our moving. And who is Anzaldúa? I inform you there are conferences built around her work that take place in San Antonio. There is a society dedicated to the study of her work and legacies as a theorist, artist and an altogether new kind of protean being, the “new mestiza,” to use her term. Furthermore, she is a Tejana, from the border near the Gulf of Mexico. You wonder why you have never heard of her and why her words are writ large on a Marfa institution. I explain that you do not know for the same reasons I grew up not knowing your work, despite our proximity, that is, because of the “colonial difference.” This is a term I take from Walter Mignolo and the Modernity/Coloniality Collective, a group that has been in conversation for some years now developing a body of work committed to understanding our current global conditions as marked at every level by what they call the coloniality of race, gender, nature and power. Decoloniality observes that people still live lives affected by the religious and scientific formations of race and human/non-human distinctions deployed during the fifteenth century explorations of the new world and the Renaissance as part of the inception of a universalized system of capitalism. The “colonial difference” is how I understand that we are in different fields of vision and knowing even when we stand together in the same physical space. But perhaps this is too heavy for our pleasant walk through Marfa, and I recommend a couple of books you might check out. You’re an avid reader. I have seen your library, and am particularly jealous of your collection of books on indigenous North Americans... …might be good 196. 2008 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1399727209036-DH89E221HXB17DZPO5LF/Franco+fig+4.jpg WORDS - Rebozo [Man] in Nepantla: Xican@ Gender & Arts Revolution In San Anto, Tejas   On behalf of the new “new kids on the block”*: we are HUNGRY for identities. We do not want them to close in on us. We do not pit them against one another. We control them; they do not control us. When they escape our control, we reign them in with our cameras, our crayons, our presses, our blogs, our pens and pencils, our markers, our clothes, our hair, our tattoos, our looks, our gestures; our accountability to one another is aestheticized and our aesthetics mediate our accountability. We create community in this accountability, not in our common identities, but we need the identities for enacting the accountability. Identities give us our ingredients. We call to one another constantly through what we make the world to look like; what we cook up haphazardly and deliberately on a daily basis. These calls happen in constantly transforming codes; as soon as they become codes they are done away with, or artifactualized, put in recipe books. We splay them out on canvas, in fields, in knit caps, in galleries, on street signs, on fucking everything, entangling them to the point of madness, a madness that colors our world, and a madness that we do together. We are hungry for identities so that we can swallow them, vomit them up, and revel in what comes out. Identity is both precious and trash to us. Precious as memories, as our cherished abuelas y abuelos. Trash as definitions, as borders, as words are becoming less and less useful. Identity gives us tongues so we can bathe each other with soft and hard lashings. Identities fuel us. We need fuel to keep up with ourselves. We revolt against postmodernism and modernism and cultural preservation. But we thank them with a wink for what they gave us as we revolt. Rebozo [Man]: dispatch from Nepantla   *This follows Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s use of the phrase “new kids on the block” in her book about the CARA Exhibit, Chicano Art Inside / Outside the Master's House, 101. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.   The full essay can be read in México en sus revoluciones: historia, crítica, y poéticas de la emancipacíon y la resistencia en México, eds. Berenice Villagómez, Alejandro Zamora, Esther Raventós-Pons, 45 - 64. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1399726181184-F3G41I1DGI1RYGP98CHT/mind+map+mignolo.jpg WORDS - MARFITA: A Toltec Methodology*   Invoking Art: In the ethno-poetics and performance of the shaman, my people, the Indians, did not split the artistic from the functional, the sacred from the secular, art from everyday life. —Gloria Anzaldúa   To investigate daily life in order to translate it into thinking is a dangerous venture, since it is necessary, particularly here in América, to make the grave mistake of contradicting the frameworks to which we are attached. —Rodolfo Kusch Introduction/Key Maps and mapping are the thematic running throughout this writing. It operates at multiple registers: as metaphor for visualizing and grouping modes of expressing thought, as organizational tool of the text itself, and as a method for making political and aesthetic interventions where called for. Whereas the ultimate aim is to delineate a methodology of the Toltec, so named following the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Laura E. Perez in concert, “(re)mapping” is a way to name the primary activity of that figure. However the figure and the activity are inextricable. The figure of the Toltec is aligned in the paper with Walter Mignolo’s “fractured subject,” and through this alignment and others, it is conceived as a figure whose daily constitution happens by activating a desire to be always involved in a remapping of the world and to the modes of expression given to the thoughtwork aimed at capturing and articulating that activity. Gestures as to how this operates in concrete terms are provided in the process of describing and rethinking the installation project MARFITA. On Mapping Me Mapping MARFITA I am currently involved in a largescale installation project entitled MARFITA. This is the Spanish diminution of the name of Marfa, a semi-rural town in far west TX, population approximately 2,100. Founded in the late 1800’s, the town has served as a center for the many ranches in the area, as home base for generations of migrant farmworkers moving between Texas and California as the seasons dictated, as the site of the US Army’s Fort D.A. Russell, and most popularly today as home to canonical American artist Donald Judd’s permanent installation of his own works and select others, under the guardianship of the Judd Foundation and the Chinati Foundation. I say most popular because this collection draws over 10,000 visitors a year to what has become a pilgrimage site of sorts for Minimalist, Post-modern, and contemporary art lovers from around the globe. It has yet one more attraction however, a pilgrimage site proper, in all the religious and sacred implications that come with the use of the term ‘pilgrimage.’ In 1997, the Virgin Mary appeared to Hector Sanchez, in the backyard of his own house, the last residential home one passes before entering the long driveway up to the Chinati Foundation’s main office. Less than half a mile from Judd’s famous cement blocks, Sanchez erected an altar to honor the apparition. Complete with a hand painted statue of the Virgin overlooking a lovingly dug and cemented shallow grotto, and housed within an upturned bath tub, this installation stands resplendently rasquache, and is positioned so that Chinati is always in her sights. She too draws pilgrims, and these are accounted for in the log kept by Sanchez’s wife, Ester. These two groups are largely unknown to one another, though their itinerant paths surely cross frequently at the auspicious, gravelly roundabout that swings pilgrims decisively toward one site or the other. *The full essay can be found in El Mundo Zurdo: Selected Works from the Meetings of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, 2010 & 2011, 135 - 154. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 2012. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1420752899434-WZ3T21KUTT7WGG6I8QRT/Screen+Shot+2015-01-08+at+4.32.52+PM.png WORDS - "Affinities, Dialogues, and Divergences" For the 2014 faculty exhibition, "Affinities, Dialogues, and Divergences," the Binghamton University Art Museum invited graduate students to write the text accompanying the artworks. Through the process, it was a delight to get to know, and interpret, Frank Chang. The show invited faculty artists to respond to works in the permanent collection with an artwork of their own. Chang selected a Late Period Egyptian wood statue of Osiris. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1431693951416-W7QCDVFJK3AUJFI2M1Y8/80f43_mar3_sva_img.jpg WORDS - Dominique Palladino and Sarah Johansen, How to Baste a Turkey Roast, 2014. Video and installation (lollipops, latex paint and Adidas). Photo: Jacqueline Iannocone. Diversity is too sweet a word now. All sugar, no meat. People tend to grin when they hear it because there’s not much else to do. But there is quite a bit to dig your teeth into if you get through the candy coating. I was invited to visit the MFA Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts recently. My aim was to get a sense of the program’s diversity (current and aspirational) so I could write about it. Something I learned at SVA: Diversity is a collaboration in candy smashing. Here are some toothsome bits dug out of the saccharine rubble: read more: http://www.artandeducation.net/announcement/learn-more-about-the-mfa-in-fine-arts/   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1442774135681-KC4T7I6N7057LUOXWUYI/tumblr_ljo68ijOdC1qzz4hto1_1280.jpg WORDS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1410959107435-LW0MX1Q7XOUV0SHXEPLJ/IMG_2476.jpg WORDS - Silence, yogi Hi Y'all, Josh Franco writing. I just came out of yoga, where this month I have been doing a call-and-response (c-a-r) experiment in preparation for my week here. I wanted to investigate the c-a-r between the body and the voice. I decided to do this in two ways: 1) I wanted to see what would happen if I refrained from making any vocal sounds unless they were absolutely forced out "involuntarily", i.e., directly from my body acting on my throat acting on my voice. The result is that my voice has felt more precious to me, and silence has felt more substantial, like fuel, like energy that's mine. The sound lets me know when I am working, growing. I've really enjoyed the conversations here about silence, waiting, and non-responses. read more   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1450022043667-42IR0NXHS0RKBHU1HS00/Issue8_1.png WORDS - Yo Soy Guadalupe Preparation: This piece is meant to be spoken. It was prompted by an invitation to the Ends of American Art Conference hosted by the Art History Department at Stanford University in November 2014. While senior scholars presented full-length papers, we graduate students were given the following parameters: one image, 5 minutes. The results were electric. My peers rose to the occasion with style and verve. Cheers to them and to the inventive organizers. One senior art historian—not a conference participant—has since identified my performance as prosopopoeia. I hear him, but I disagree. Prosopopoeia names the ancient Greek concept of speaking as an object, a thing. Here, the thing is not the central action, not the locus from which the voice emanates. For communicability between materialists and art historians (all people who need and love our things), I offer the image of this plaster construction crafted in an attitude of utter devotion by a man and continuously sweated over by a family and pilgrims. But this is not the thing speaking. It is the transcribed voice of a goddess of the Americas. Not prosopopoeia, but inhabitation, presence, blessing. It is appropriate to light a candle (preferably red) before reading aloud and to blow out the candle following the last word. Y ahorita, La Guadalupe: Yo soy Guadalupe. I am Guadalupe. read the full writing in Shift: Graduate Journal of Material and Visual Culture https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1450818456465-ICVGM0ZDG5EMTBUZRQNF/image-asset.jpeg WORDS - EXPOSED: Process, Couture, and Photography in Marfa, Texas Presented at the 2013 Annual IFA - Frick Symposium on the History of Art   “Exposure” has at least three meanings: to reveal; to be left open to the elements; and the mechanical-chemical process of photography. Traversing these definitions, this paper compares colloquial understandings of labor and process in Minimalist works with interpretations of the same operating in the realms of high fashion and the art world. As an interpretive tool for describing multiple inhabitations of Marfa, Texas, “exposure” opens conversations around the unspoken labor congealed in Donald Judd’s Minimalist works, the misidentification of exposed processes by the haute couture design team Proenza Schouler, and the fashion industry’s appropriation of the Marfa landscape through film and photography, particularly in the works of Mario Sorrenti and Josie Miner. What is at stake for the legacy of Minimalism, and Donald Judd in particular, in this comparison? For present-day Marfans? From its inception in the 1960’s, why has Minimalism held enduring appeal for the fashion industry? How do different photographic interpretations of Marfa and the Far West Texas landscape trouble, comply with, or otherwise complicate understandings of the town from multiple aesthetic, cultural, and economic vectors? Through the trope of exposure, this paper attends to these questions, while building a connective thread through industrial labor, high fashion, and the medium of photography as they shape understandings of Minimalism. This presentation includes new research; interviews with metal shop workers in West Texas, archival materials from the Judd Foundation in Marfa and New York City, and images of Donald Judd prototypes never before shown in an art historical context. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1399770879169-5RTN6898KW007TIA5VME/photo-4.jpg WORDS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1399771323121-5SONF1FK4NGJZYH76YX8/The-Books.jpg WORDS http://www.joshtfranco.com/about daily 0.75 2026-03-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1442783764456-3TTOVT9AUQG25VMB336W/collecting+boots+4.jpg ABOUT - COLLECTING: Colorado, August 15 - 19 Latino Collections Specialist Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution As a collector of primary sources for the study of Latino art, I conduct a systematic campaign to acquire the most important personal papers and organizational records and substantially increase the Smithsonian’s archival resources concerning Latino art and artists. I am responsible for the judicious selection, description, and scholarly appraisal of collections through a close examination of their contents. Using critical and professional judgment, I ensure that the interests of the Archives are appropriately represented and in accordance with the Archives’ established management policies and collections plan. I negotiate the conditions of gifts working closely with the Archives’ registrar and deputy director to secure a fully executed deed of gift. When appropriate, I conduct oral history interviews for the Archives’ oral history program. I also serve as an authority on Latino art, consulting with and advising researchers, including curators, art historians, graduate students, and others to bring relevant sources of information to their attention. I collaborate and serve as the Archives’ liaison with other units across the Smithsonian, particularly the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Museum of American History, and as appropriate, participatesin Smithsonian Latino Center pan-institutional planning and working committees. I assist in identifying grant sources and other forms of financial support for the Archives’ operations as they relate to a focused initiative to acquire primary sources for the study of Latino art. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1488468749123-HAO1MYCHD3J93CYDL1EM/email.jpg ABOUT https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1590426546569-Y08DHNVPOISZJ3EMW5HT/IMG-0461.jpg ABOUT https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1711194250128-OHXNFZ2D1AGL7FW9B1ET/199147_537057884917_82184_n.jpg ABOUT - BIO Josh T Franco (b. 1985) is an artist and art historian from West Texas who believes that art history is made by hand. As an artist, Franco’s primary medium is the discipline of art history itself. Using performance and a variety of materials, he transforms the components of being an art historian—reading, writing, annotating, sketching, lecturing, looking, museum going, archival research and so on—into artworks appropriate for museums and galleries and their audiences. Franco’s art has been exhibited and supported by Co-Lab Projects, Esperanza Peace & Justice Center, WorkSpaceBrussels, Mini Art Museum, NurtureArt Gallery, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, DePauw University, HistoryMiami Museum, Studio SoHy, Elsewhere Museum, Addison Gallery of American Art, Agave Festival Marfa, Zygote Press, The Future Mpls, 516ARTS, Olga Korper Gallery, Albuquerque Museum, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Davis Gallery, Syracuse University Art Museum, Art Bridges Foundation, Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, ICA Philadelphia, and the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. In 2025-2026, Franco is NEH Innovator in Residence at Colorado College. As an art historian, Franco has presented scholarly and critical work in venues including Stanford University, College Art Association, Utrecht University, HEMI Graduate Student Initiative (Hemispheric Institute), zingmagazine, The Frick Collection, Third Text, Latino Art Now!, Joan Mitchell Foundation, OCTOBER, Independent Curators International, Gulf Coast, Latino Studies, and The Journal of Feminist Scholarship. He has written exhibition-related text for Theaster Gates, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Charlotte Hallberg, Zoe Leonard, Miguel Luciano, Hiram Maristany, and Joshua Saunders among others. His book, Marfa, Marfa: Rasquachismo and Minimalism in Far West Texas, forthcoming with Duke University Press, is supported by a Terra Foundation for American Art Publication Grant. His dissertation on the same subject was completed at Binghamton University (2016). He completed a BA in Art History at Southwestern University (2007). CV Currently based: Hyattsville, Maryland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1431692912360-R5Y30SGBNGQ1246FR6FT/IMG_0736.JPG ABOUT https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1404115280705-3YA0FJVRLYYA692IU41N/199147_537057884917_82184_n.jpg ABOUT http://www.joshtfranco.com/postarthistory daily 0.75 2018-12-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1538222426568-J5SIZZYEPP35V7CWUIHT/fullsizeoutput_6a5.jpeg POSTARTHISTORY http://www.joshtfranco.com/postarthistory/monthly-subscription-of-altered-postcards-with-art-historical-micro-lessons-and-musings monthly 0.5 2021-10-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1543864675864-A6FO31IN25PF7P6280CO/IMG_0013.jpg POSTARTHISTORY - POSTARTHISTORY https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1543864675740-VGZG5THH8C6ORBVDCR74/IMG_0014.jpg POSTARTHISTORY - POSTARTHISTORY https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/536a8190e4b0e58dd0b52f52/1543864676918-G2PPE6CVLL0AVY2UBTT3/IMG_0015.jpg POSTARTHISTORY - 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