Summer Salon Series 2012: Beyond the Banner

 

Art-Making Activity

Join Museum Educator Lucy Eron for an art-making workshop that is sure to be fun for all ages and skill levels.  

 

Rina Banerjee

The Indian born, New York City based artist Rina Banerjee has a love of materials, heritage textiles, fashion, colonial objects and furnishings, and historical architecture, due to their ability to disguise, animate, and locate their inherent meanings in her art work. She has said that her work explores "specific colonial moments that reinvent place and identity as complex diasporic experiences." Her preoccupation with the role of culture, mythology, fairy tales, anthropology, and ethnography fold into trajectories of race, exotic capital, and the forces of our migration-mobility, tourism, and global commerce. The tensions and desires created out of our individual, increased travel, and our access to information technologies, have perforated traditional boundaries, creating a malleability that reflects a globalized sense of space and a diminished experience of dominant culture paradigm.

 

Gary Garay

When is Southern California north?
This year’s Salon has been exploring how information is disseminated and filtered, and what types of narratives can be used in the telling of history. Tonight, Ganas (artist Gary Garay) of DJ Collective Mas Exitos, will use music as the vehicle by which the shared culture of the Americas can be explored. Exclusively employing vinyl records, Garay’s presentation-given from a donkey cart one might find on Avenida Revolucion in Tijuana- ultimately traces cultural migration patterns through North and South America. Specifically, the artist digs through his extensive back catalogue of records, which feature the sounds of San Diego and Tijuana, as well as American songs covered in Spanish by Mexican or South American bands, to highlight the dialogue that has carried back and forth across countries and continents to produce the fusions of Cumbia, East Los Angeles dance, Tropicalia, Chicano rock and Latin psychedelic music. Mas Exitos seeks to take listeners on a trip from the tip of Chile to the backyards of Los Angeles, conflating vast geographies and cultures into a more unified, shared past.