Sewing Groups Grupos de Costura en Franja Arte Comunidad

This is the last sewing workshop with women from the coastal town of ENGABAO in Ecuador. Beautiful experience, we will continue with its implementation and follow up. We will be deepening into women´s rights while we continue to sew and maintain this safe intimate space of friendship and confidence.

Este es el último taller de costura con mujeres de la comuna de ENGABAO en la costa del Guayas. Una experiencia maravillosa mientras le damos sostenimiento a La Franja arte Comunidad y a los talleres. Estaremos haciendo hincapié en los derechos de las mujeres mientras seguimos cosiendo y manteniendo este espacio libre y salvo para la amistad y la confianza.







Maria Fernanda Cartagena y yo en el taller



Cortando...



Agapito y su tela






En pleno trabajo




Since 2007 I have created various sewing groups driven by the needs to provide a space for communal gathering, for the recuperation of a feminine space of talk and sharing, and for the community love for socially based sewing. In my initial exploration of this working method, I worked with a women’s collective which was not focused on creating objects devoid of their context. We focused principally on generating sharing, warmth, and community among women. Our first project, realized in the context of Al-Zurich Festival 2007 with women from the South of Quito- Ecuador, was "Regalos" or "Gifts"
a project that involved sewing and dancing as gifts creating an alternative economy of affections and exchanges.

We subsequently created the “30 x 30 Quilt” Project. We asked women from around Latin America to participate by making an autobiographical 30 by 30 centimeter sewn square. We then worked together with artist Andrea Sica’s (from Uruguay) "Belly button project," wherein we sewed our squares together and sent them to Uruguay to be sewn together with their local squares. Most of the women participants were not self defined as artists per se; most were dedicated sewers or knitters in their own right.

Simultaneously, we created another sewing group called "Hilando Fino" on the coast of Ecuador within the context of the artist residency Solo con Natura in 2009. The project invited women from this coastal community to gather together and sew their own personal stories. These women often came with the strong burden of adolescent pregnancies and general violence against them. The project proved to be an excellent channel for their various interests and a great support system. The group has also started to create their own objects such as banners and pillow covers. They are still meeting every week and I sure hope they can continue their group to see it flourish.






Puerto el Morro "HIlando Fino" 2009







Project "Doll House" 2010








"regalos" or "Gifts" 2007

323 Gallery

Artificial Paradise revisited, by Ana Fernandez (Miranda Texidor) Piano, by Walter Sunday


Dogs and Cats, Donna-Pesce- Passero, Little doll trio


Summer of love


Little doll trio


Parcheesi


View of installation



Some of the work in exhibition at 323 gallery, Potrero Ave. San Francisco

323 Gallery Marmangios October 28

The 323 Gallery is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition of artists Miranda Texidor and Walter Sunday. The show runs from October 27 through November 26. The opening reception is on Thursday, October 28, from 6 to 9 p.m.

Walter Sunday began his exhibition career in the New York City of the early 1980’s. Sunday’s sculptures lent themselves to the Neo-expressionist movement, which came out of the Lower East Side, consisting of psychologically loaded figurative works, which were brightly painted, and evocatively installed. At present, Walter is a resident of San Francisco and fabricating his works in a South of Market Area studio where he continues to explore his and humanity’s relationships to the object.

The present show consists of six small works. Each piece is hand-carved from one piece of Douglas fir wood, painted with oils and enamels, including specific gilded and silver leafed elements.

Sunday tries to trigger the viewers’ imaginations and allow the viewer to suggest, and create her or his own associations; thereby evoking new interpretations with everyday objects. He sees his designs as being playful mental exercises, and strives for personal and collective meaning within the application of experience. Walter attempts to understand complexity through making his sculpture. By making an everyday commodity a subjective experience, he hopes to achieve a universal truth, and truth being the most rare of commodities as he sees life. Should we trust our perceptions to be the same as others, he asks?

Attempting to integrate the experience of his perceptions interacting with everyday objects, Sunday interprets his personal sensations, or feelings, about his interaction and relationship with an object. To this idea, he believes that everyone is true to each of his or her own perceptions, experiences, and feelings.

Ana Fernandez (Miranda Texidor) was born in 1963 and raised in Quito, Ecuador. She graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a BFA in Painting and received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from California College of the Arts. Ana explores the intersection between the real and the fantastic through drawing, painting, writing, education and art based social practice.

She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krassner Foundation Award, and was an Artist in Residence at Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale New York. She received a grant to develop and Art Program in Yunguilla Ecuador through Center for Art and Public Life. She has been Painting faculty at Universidad Central del Ecuador, and Broward College Ecuador. She is current Studio Practice Instructor for the MFA program at California College of the Arts in Potrero Hill.

Ana created and currently develops workshops with the Museum in a Box, a program to bring Contemporary Ecuadorian Art to communities around the world, through a grant from the Ecuadorian Cultural Department. She has conducted various socially based sewing collaborations in Ecuador and California. Her work has been shown throughout Latin America, Spain, Italy, and the US and is in various collections. (download PR doc)

Marmangios - 2010 I am interested in the poetic research, finding and wonderment of “other” worlds. I find the keeping and tending of imaginary spaces fascinating. These spaces are playful moments of time or matter, which exist mainly in children’s play as marvelous secrets hidden from adults. We might be able to tap on them, if we keep that wonderment key, given to us as kids and so easily lost as we grow up.

I might recreate this space in performatic play as with Miranda Texidor´s circus, or in drawing as in the Marmangios series, in small-scale dioramas as “Quinceañera” or in writings such as Miranda Texidor´s collection of poems. These spaces of otherness are full of fantastic creatures, absurd stories and disparate times.

Marmangios is a Portuguese word that describes big and somehow desperate beings. I have been inspired to recreate these characters based on some creatures I have seen in my outings on buses around town. - Miranda Texidor

323 Gallery Schedule
Wednesday - Friday (3PM to 7PM) or by appointment
323 Potrero Ave. (at 16th) SF, CA 94103 / 415-626-4333

Muni #9 and 22. Easy parking nearby.

© 2010 323Gallery. All rights reserved.

Open Studios at the Ranch

Open Studios 2010 at the Cataclysmic Megashear Ranch. Thanks to all the wonderful people that came and shared with us. We had quite a good crowd, art, music, poetry and goodies. It was fun!

Benditos negativos, street art en Quito, Ecuador

Artículo escrito para la Bg revista de Cuenca. Habla de algunos de los artistas jóvenes que hacen las "pintadas" que vemos en la calle a menudo.

Article published by BG Magazine from Cuenca, about street art in Quito Ecuador.

OPEN STUDIOS 2010 AT THE RANCH

I will be showing my drawings, fabric and museum in a box at the Cataclysmic Megashear Ranch studios 1433 Van Dyke Av. at Jennings st. 2nd floor on October 16 and 17 from 11 am to 6 pm come by!!!

Political Speech for a Hydra

A performance done in the streets in Ecuador on the text by artist Jason Kunke, translated by myself and socialized in the Plaza de la Independencia Quito in 2008

Puerto El Morro a year ago, a socially engaged art project

This is the video documentation of a project envisioned by artist Larissa Marangoni in which 10 artists from Ecuador participated and lived in the community of Puerto el Morro engaging in art based Social Practices projects. Among them Falco Fernando Falconí, Ana Fernandez, Josie Caceres, Paulina León, Mayra Estevez, Fabiano Kueva, Edu Carrera, curated by Maria Fernanda Cartagena, with the participation of Alejandro Meitin from Argentina, David Gutierrez, Colombia, Ana Vela, Manuel Kingman and others. Within the community, leader Pedro Morales was one of the key figures as well as Elida, Silvia, Doña
Carmela and other amazing women from this town. Video by Paola Luzuriaga, photography by Javier Lazo

Bellos Callejeros

Out there and fresh from the oven, Revista Diners published the article I wrote about street artists in Ecuador. I became interested in their doings after what seemed a long time without anything fresh happening in the art scene around my home town. All the exhibits in galleries and art spaces seemed stale, extra intellectual an overtly influenced by anthropological rhetoric and demeanor. I found myself immersed in the comings and goings of a group of street artists, very young for the most, ready to take on the streets with their characters and poise, without the voice and the eye of any critic or curator, stenciling, painting, inventing, hanging from bridges and pouring paint. Street artists in Ecuador conform a new fresh batch of collectives that defy the mainstream of collecting and art space going, taking it right out to you with in your face antics and sheer joy. Political in the sense that just taking art out to the streets is a democratic gesture, generous for the fact that they are willing to share it, the painting the experience and the act with everyone, no closures, or enclosures, no charge, no fee, no dress code. Beautiful in their youth and ready to challenge certain art notions that might choke us with their stiffness, these atreet-smarts are a bunch to follow.

Project Doll House another craft as social practice project

Sharing food and work Lola Sevilla and kids



Maria Perez y Vidita



Paula Barragan, Josie Caceres, Caro Vasconez y Lola Solis


Paula y su Bella



Crafts as social practice or crafts in the expanded field is what I would call this project I have been immersed in since 2007. With the collaboration of artist and dancer Josie Caceres, we have created various sewing groups out of our need of getting together, recuperating a feminine space of talk and sharing, and our love for socially based sewing. At first we did not mind very much what we were creating, in terms of object. We were not interested in creating objects devoid of their context. We were interested in generating sharing and warmth among women in the first place. So the first project was "Regalos" or "Gifts" which was done in the context of Al-Zurich Festival 2007 with women from the South of Quito. Then we created the 30 x 30 project asking women from everywhere to participate making a 30 by 30 centimeter square somehow autobiographical, we merged with artist Andrea Sica from Uruguay and her "Belly button project" joining together our squares and sending them off to Uruguay to be joined with some more. Most women were not artists, most are dedicated sewers or knitters in their own right.
Meanwhile we also created another sewing group "Hilando fino" in the coast of Ecuador within the context of Solo con Natura, an artist residency in 2009.
Our last project was proposed by artist Paula Barragan who has been a lively part of "Costurrika" a sewing group among artists in the North of Quito. We have been getting together since 2007 in different houses, sharing food, conversation and lately our dolls. In fact "Doll House" has been a very challenging project in terms of sewing, time and dedication. Some of the women invited to make a doll have not been part of the sewing group experience so many have gone solo in their sewing journey. Other have invited other people to join them in the making. Anyway the making of the craft object in this case is not an authors alone practice, it is a community practice and is in such in which it attains content and meaning. Conversations range from topics as varied as love, sex, kids, marriage, partnership, feminist based politics, art, etc.
Food we have shared ranges from bread and cheese to wine and other delicacies. laughter and lots of sharing. Now the extended community joins us in our seances that happen everyday in El Conteiner in Quito Ecuador. (I join them by skype)