MEXICAN AND SPANISH

Searching for Those Special Mexican and Spanish Treasures

Every October Tucson's Obsidian Gallery throws a month-long party for skeletons. There are skeletons duded up in party dresses, skeletons that look like Mickey Mouse wrapped in a Mexican serape, skeletons riding motorcycles, skeletons blowing trumpets, skeletons grinning from shot glasses. It's the gallery's annual Dia de los Muertos show, which celebrates Mexico's "Day of the Dead" festival held on November 2, the day on which the dearly departed are believed by some to return home for a visit. "People are taken aback by it," admits Obsidian owner Elouise Rusk. "I spend a lot of time explaining." Perhaps, I offer, Mexican poet Octavio Paz captures it best: "The Mexican is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it...." In keeping with that, the images associated with Day of the Dead celebrations are much more humorous than macabre. And, says Rusk, connoisseurs throughout the country contact her gallery every year to collect new pieces. Dos Cabezas, "two heads," is Scottsdale's toniest Mexican arts and crafts gallery. Owner Newey DeMille opened it 44 years ago "simply to make a living," as she now says. Not just another gallery featuring the usual Mexican folk art, Dos Cabezas commissions original works from Mexican artists, such as the chain of four cinema seats with portraits of conquistador Hernan Cortes, patriots Jose Maria Morelos and Emiliano Zapata, and dictator Porfirio Díaz. "I've never known a Mexican who didn't have a hidden artistic talent," says a smiling DeMille. "You just have to encourage and develop it." That sweeping observation could be buttressed by the Mendivil family, which moved from Mexico City to Tucson 10 years ago and four years later opened ¡Aquí Esta!, a huge Mexican import and custom furniture store in an old brick warehouse. Proprietor Martha Mendivil's son, Gerardo Olmedo, promptly taught himself woodcarving and cabinetmaking and began turning out dazzlingly elaborate bed headboards covered with carved leaves, flowers, abstract curlicues, and rising suns which Mendivil paints in typically Mexican eye-opening colors of yellow, red, pink, blue, and turquoise.

Arizona is a fertile land in which to explore Mexican and Latin American collectibles. There are scores of shops in Phoenix, Tucson, and Tubac and just across the border in Nogales, Sonora that deal in imports, reproductions, or, like Obsidian, American-crafted interpretations of Mexican folk art traditions.

A few shops, such as Phoenix's Casa del Encanto, specialize in Spanish Colonial antiques. At least one, La Paloma de Tubac, deals not only in Mexican crafts but also Guatemalan, Peruvian, and Ecuadorian. And, of course, there's Calle Obregón, the shopping district in Nogales, Sonora, where the adventurous collector should import a good sense of humor and a strong conviction for what constitutes schlock, kitsch, and art. All are available on Calle Obregón, but they aren't labeled.

When Luis Corona moved to San Diego, California, from Michoacan, Mexico, in 1970, he brought along a sense of responsibility to his native country. “It used to hurt me when I would go back to my village and see beautiful stone buildings with ceramic tile torn down. I decided to make it a part of my daily living to preserve that culture.” Which Corona does, in a foreign nation. His shop, Casa del Encanto, near downtown Phoenix features 18thand 19th-century retablos (religious images on silver, or wood, or some other material), historic Mexican furniture, and commissioned reproductions. We talk, seated in a pair of gigantic chairs ornamented with rustic carving; they seem much larger than the furniture in my house as does most of what lounges around Corona's shop.

“This oversize furniture started in Mexico with the building of great haciendas,” he explains. “The furniture was out of human scale, but it was very much in harmony with its physical environment.” Before the Mexican revolution of 1911-20, the arts and crafts of the country had a European accent. “Mexican craftsmen, though, were a little more primitive, rustic, less precise,” says Corona. “There was more of a sense of formality in Europe, and they were more advanced in tools and technology. But I think that's to Mexico's advantage. I don't like perfection without harmony. I like things that are imperfect and have harmony.” After the political revolution came an artistic one. A monsoon of national pride swept the country, and mestizos and pure-blooded Indians turned back to their roots for inspiration. Color and fantasy reigned supreme.

Scottsdale's Dos Cabezas, for example, features a dizzying variety of animal sculptures, including carved wooden serpents with apples in their mouths and a green ceramic cat with a forest scene painted on its flank. Nogales' Crazy Frog exhibits wood carvings of winged dragons in a panoply of scarlet, pink, turquoise, and bright blue. ¡Aquí Esta!, the Mendivils' Tucson store, has a ceremonial mask from the state of Guerrero with four figures stacked vertically on it: the face of Death, a tiger, the Devil, and a frog.

But was this artistic revolution more about commercialism than nationalism? Gloria Giffords of Tucson, a serious collector and author of Mexican Folk Retablos, believes so. “These people haven't become more phantasmagorical in the last century; I think it's an attempt to attract business.” Casa del Encanto's Corona agrees. “It's becoming very, very commercialized. It's becoming hard to find people who are doing something just for the love of it. Mexico is so rich in culture and artists, but they prostitute themselves because they're hungry and I understand that.” “For example,” adds Giffords, “about 15 years ago, the women of an Indian village called Ocomichu in the state of Michoacan produced clay Christmas bells for children.

COLLECTING THE WEST

That's all they did. Then someone from Mexico City showed the women how to produce colorful demons from the same clay. They don't sell these to other Mexicans; they sell them to foreigners. To Americans, seeing a demon riding a bicycle, that's worth a laugh."

Nevertheless, it continues to be possible to find and collect exquisite Mexican art, crafts, and furniture, and if you shop wisely, often at very reasonable prices.

Talavera ware, brilliantly painted ceramics that are a specialty of the city of Puebla, has been made in essentially the same way since the 16th century. Most of it is utilitarian bowls, plates, cups - but Dos Cabezas has unbelievably elaborate Talavera candleholders that feature four crocodiles climbing highly stylized pyramids to support the candle plate.

Images of santos, or “saints,” and the painted religious scenes are ancient traditions still honored today, though probably more in the U.S. Southwest than in Mexico itself. “We started collecting retablos and santos 30 years ago,” says Giffords. “In the early days, people were selling them for $4 apiece. It was unbelievable.” Such collectibles, says Giffords, are now more easily obtained in U.S. shops than in Mexican markets, and “most of the best ones are here.” Aren't U.S. collectors, then, depriving Mexico of part of its cultural heritage?

“I don't think so,” she says. “We are talking about things that people had discarded willingly, replaced by modern lithographs that don't rust. I don't look at Americans as people who are raping and plundering their neighbor. Styles change; people's tastes change.” Incidentally, not all collectors of Mexican religious art are believers themselves. At a gallery in Santa Fe that specializes in santos, a man who says he's a committed atheist buys one of the little statues every year. Finally, owner Rey Montez asked him why. He said, “They're pretty, and they make me feel peaceful.” Spanish Colonial collectibles are, of course, rarer and more expensive. And Mexico's antiquity law is rather murky. Pre-Columbian and colonial art cannot be taken out of the country; but decorative art can. The problem, says Giffords, is that there's seldom anyone at border crossings who can make the distinction or accurately judge the age. Corona, though, says he's never had a problem when buying for his Casa del Encanto.

For the average art lover, where to buy collectibles is not a problem; the Tucson phone book alone lists 14 Mexican importers. Nogales, Sonora, is controversial. Some people think it's great fun; others are put off by the hubbub, the haggling, and the constant hawking of vendors trying to lure customers into their stores. Actually, the merchandise in Arizona stores, particularly ¡Aquí Esta! and Dos Cabezas, is less likely to be predictable. A famous mansion in Nogales, Arizona, owned by Edward Holler and Samuel Saunders, houses an astounding collection of Spanish Colonial art and furnishings, not only from Mexico but from South America as well - and it's all for sale. Markets in Mexican towns and cities deep in the country's interior also can be a rich source, and the interior has great dignity, beauty, and antiquity going for it, as well. “There's a fascination with things from Mexico that seems to be insatiable among Americans and Europeans,” Giffords says. “And people like me are even more fascinated with the culture. We're probably reincarnated Aztec sacrifice victims who keep returning to Mexico in search of our hearts.”