A panel of University of Oregon faculty members was hosted at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on Wednesday night, comprised of three professors with a scholarly connection to the province of Oaxaca, Mexico.
The panel was presented in concurrence with the exhibit “Pinceladas en el insomnio,” a body of artwork created by Oaxacan painter Rolando Rojas and on loan to the JSMA from the Consulate of Mexico in Portland. Although the presentations and subsequent Q&A session with these faculty members were not directly associated with the paintings or the painter himself, they focused on the topic that Rolando claims as inspiration for this particular series of paintings: indigenous culture in the region of Oaxaca.
Sharon Kaplan, Museum Educator at the JSMA, views hosting the panel of women as an essential part of her job.
“The idea was to give grounding for the arts and culture in Oaxaca … to give a broader spectrum of what his work is like,” she said.
Anthropology Professor Lyn Stephens gave a presentation about the indigenous presence in Oaxaca made evident by the remaining prevalence of the traditional regional language of the Zapotec Indians. According to Stephens there are more than one million people who claim Zapotec heritage in the world today, not only in Mexico but also in California and parts of Oregon. Woodburn, Ore. has its own Zapotec store offering delicacies from grasshoppers to mole, and Gresham, Ore. boasts a traditional Zapotec market. Stephens believes that Rojas’ nature-related paintings were inspired by the Zapotec mindset.
“(Zapotec) people, when they walk through the world … they are deeply connected to the earth, to the people who are in that landscape … and each piece of the landscape has a name,” she said.
Stephanie Wood, director of Wired Humanities Projects at the UO, gave a presentation about the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institutes for Schoolteachers that she helps host annually through the Wired Humanities Projects. Each summer she takes a group of 30 K-12 teachers to Oaxaca in order to help them learn more about the Mexican culture – a subject that many of them strive to embrace due to the growing number of Hispanic children in their classrooms. During a month-long seminar they explore the Zapotec indigenous culture and “Oaxaca as a place for the arts in general.”
Gabriela Martinez, an associate professor of journalism, lectured on indigenous efforts to perpetuate the native Zapotec culture through media use. According to Martinez, indigenous media efforts have been springing up since the 1980s and now include projects like the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, the Center for Indigenous Video and Ojo de Agua Communications. The goal of these groups is to preserve Mexico’s cultural vitality under the strain of westernization.
“Basically there is a whole philosophy and a whole rhetoric there … this is media produced by indigenous people to be consumed by indigenous people inside of Mexico,” Marinez said.
Rojas’ exhibit, the History, Culture and Recent Artistic and Social Developments in Oaxaca panel and a presentation on Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos that the JSMA hosted in early November follow a pattern of embracing Hispanic culture.
“It’s a community that we’re working on engaging in many ways,” Kaplan said.