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For more on Ruben Trejo
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Ruben Trejo exhibition on display
May 1, 2010 -- November 13, 2010
Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture
Spokane, WA
Join editor Ben Mitchell and contributor John Keeble
May 6, 2010 at 7 p.m.
Auntie's Bookstore
Spokane, WA
For details on events or
Ruben Trejo, please contact
Rachael Levay at (857) 756.8443 or remann@u.washington.edu
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"Multiple backgrounds can form such two- and three-dimensional ideas
that they take you to the brink of lunacy, but I have used this rich
background and ethnic landscape for creating art. As a student at the
University of Minnesota, I often wondered what the study of Russian
history, Shakespeare, English literature, or Freud . . . had to do with
cleaning onions in Hollandale, Minnesota, picking potatoes in Hoople,
North Dakota, or visiting relatives in Michoacán. This diversity of
ideas can produce a three-headed monster or an artist, and I chose the
latter." -Ruben Trejo
Ruben Trejo: Beyond Boundaries / Aztlán y más alláis the first comprehensive survey of Trejo's art and career.
It focuses on more than fifty works from 1964 through the present,
including pieces from his delightful life-size, puppet-like Clothes for
Day of the Dead series; works from the Calzones series -- cast bronze
underwear and jalapenos -- that challenge the Spanish machismo culture;
seminal examples of his lifelong exploration of the cruciform image;
and much more. The volume includes biographical and interpretive
essays, as well as a chronology, list of exhibitions, and bibliography.
Ruben
Trejo (1937-2009) was born in a Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad
yard in St. Paul, Minnesota, where his father, a mixed Tarascan Indian
and Hispanic from Michoacán, Mexico, and his mother, from Ixtlan in the
same Mexican province, had found a home for the family in a boxcar
while his father worked for the railroad. Trejo became the first in his
family to graduate from college, and in 1973 he moved to the Pacific
Northwest, where he began a thirty-year association with Eastern
Washington University as teacher and artist.
His isolation from
major centers of Chicano culture led him to search for self-identity
through his art. Influenced and inspired by such writers and artists as
Octavio Paz and Guillermo Gómez-Pena, he explored a dynamic,
multidimensional worldview through his sculpture and mixed-media pieces
and created a body of work that deftly limns his identity as an artist
and a Chicano. Throughout his long teaching career, he worked
tirelessly to create opportunities for young Chicanos through tutoring
and mentoring.
Ben Mitchell, writer and teacher, is senior curator of art at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, Washington.
Tomás
Ybarra-Frausto is former professor of Spanish and Portuguese at
Stanford University and former associate director for creativity and
culture at the Rockefeller Foundation.
John Keeble, professor
emeritus at Eastern Washington University, is the author of four
novels, including Yellowfish and Broken Ground.
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The 