The University of Central Arkansas College of Fine Arts and Communication will host a watch party for the PBS television show “Art21 Mexico City” on Tuesday, Nov. 15.
The viewing, free and open to the public, will be at 6:30 p.m. in McCastlain Hall room 143, the art lecture hall. A discussion will follow.
“Art21” is in its eighth season on PBS.
“Because ‘Art21’ offers a highly respected approach to the broad issues of contemporary art, we feel that this will be a great experience for our students,” said Brian Young, interim director of the Baum Gallery.
According to its website, “Art21” provides unparalleled access to the most innovative artists of our time, revealing how artists engage the culture around them and how art allows viewers to see the world in new ways. In season eight, the 16 featured artists are grouped by relationships to the places where they live: Chicago, Los Angeles, Mexico City and Vancouver. Mexico City artists exit their homes and studios to use the growing megalopolis as their canvas. The artists present everyday materials as artworks, mine recognizable images for their poetic potential and take their art to the streets.
Within this episode, viewers will see how Damián Ortega uses objects from his everyday life — Volkswagen Beetle cars, Day of the Dead posters, locally sourced corn tortillas — to make spectacular sculptures, which suggest stories of both mythic import and cosmological scale. Pedro Reyes designs ongoing projects that propose playful solutions to urgent social problems. From turning guns into musical instruments, to hosting a People’s United Nations to address pressing concerns, to offering ecologically friendly grasshopper burgers from a food cart, Reyes transforms existing problems into ideas for a better world. The program will include glimpses into the work of more than a dozen additional artists from Mexico City.
For more information, contact Young at 501-450-5793 or bkyoung@uca.edu.
The UCA College of Fine Arts and Communication includes the Departments of Art, Music, and Film, Theatre and Creative Writing, as well as the School of Communication. The college’s primary mission is the preparation of the next generation of artists, educators and communicators. For more information about CFAC, visit www.uca.edu/cfac or call 501-450-3293.
