Next year, the Arlington Museum of Art will move from downtown into the city's entertainment district. Specifically, it'll be near the National Medal of Honor Museum currently under construction near Nolan Ryan Expressway and AT&T Way.
So now the museum has opened its last two shows at its downtown location. Both shows confront death and politics - in very different ways.
The major exhibition, Jose Guadalupe Posada: Legendary Printmaker of Mexico, surveys the many different artistic and media products of the prolific Posada. He's the late 19th-century printmaker best known for his many images of laughing, dancing, fighting skeletons or calevaras.
Posada was what we'd consider a pop culture artist-journalist — a brilliant, hard-working illustrator. He created breaking-news images, cartoons, lithographs and engravings for newspapers, advertisements, political pamphlets, magazines, broadsides. Many were conventional, more typical of late-19th century news accounts of murders and disasters, but Posada's are distinguished by his fluid line and dramatic impact.
The Arlington show, originating from the Posada Art Foundation, even includes several board games Posada produced. Characteristic of the time and place — when only about a third of the Mexican population was literate — Posada's work was wildly popular, yet his passing (in 1913) went almost unnoticed. He trafficked in galloping, grinning, grasping death, but his own demise didn't make the news.
Calevaras literally translates as 'skulls.' And it's the skulls - often laughing, shouting, smoking cigars, wearing floral bonnets - that truly animate the images on display. Originally, these figures often were sensational and satiric, although Posada only occasionally (carefully) caricatured the politics of the Diaz dictatorship and the early years of the Mexican Revolution.
Many times, the calevaras are not even particularly ghoulish — they're so alive, comical and individual. Little wonder, then, they became beloved hallmarks of Dia de los Muertos, along with altars and sugar skulls. Hence, the timing of this show: Dia de los Muertos is next week.
Upstairs at the Arlington Museum is a second, smaller exhibition, this one of works by Fort Worth sculptor and installation artist Bernardo Vallarino.
The 'rooftop' show, Hard On: Guns, Gold and God continues Vallarino's interest in how we callously mistreat our fellow humans — while proclaiming allegiance to higher principles, religious or civic. It's that gulf between a supposed moral order and real-life cruelties or loss that has been Vallarino's main theme.
Previously, Vallarino has portrayed refugees as masses of small, hapless, faceless individuals — because that's how we often treat them. Or humans are metaphoric insects. The work "Pestecides" features a pair of human-silhouette gun range targets with insecticide labels (the aptly named "Combat"). Meanwhile, the artist's entire series, The Butterfly Case, offers butterflies, trapped and pinned under glass.
Despite the grimness of such issues, Vallarino's artworks always have a sense of orderliness and design (the butterflies, needless to say, are beautiful victims). Even as his artworks are acts of protest or savage satire, they often have the polish of high-end window displays.
It's a deliberate tactic, Vallarino said, to keep the viewer from simply turning away.
"The topics tend to be heavy," he said, "sometimes things that humans don't want to be faced with. So when the artworks do have that feel, that attention to detail, it creates a bridge."
He doesn't blunt the edge of his works; he gives them a sheen.
But Vallarino intended the Arlington show as a transition between these earlier series and his new works. So the exhibition contains items from both — as a way showing continuity but also sharp difference. This is especially apparent with his more explicit, direct treatment of both gun violence and gay sexuality.
"I have been dealing with issues of violence, people as victims of violence," Vallarino said. "And guns have always been at the beginning of the story, kind of the catalyst. And it is very daunting to always be thinking about how to describe pain, other individuals' pain in a sensitive way. "
But after working for years like that, "I decided, 'Okay, let's look at what causes a lot of this violence.' And seeing as guns have no feeling, I can put a lot more teeth and claws into the topic.
"So that's why," Vallarino said, "things are going to start looking a little more different."
Jose Guadalupe Posada: Legendary Printmaker of Mexico and Hard On: Guns, Gold and God run at the Arlington Museum of Art through January 7th.
Got a tip? Email Jerome Weeks atjweeks@kera.org. You can follow him on Twitter @dazeandweex.
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