This video captures a reception held June 26, 2020, to celebrate the public launch of Newcomb Art Museum’s first virtual online exhibition, "Conexión: Art and Activism in Oaxaca, Mexico", ConexionOAX.info. It includes tours with collaborators and a behind-the-scenes look at the show’s process of development, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The exhibition, "Conexión: Art and Activism in Oaxaca, Mexico", was envisioned and curated by thirteen Tulane University students taking the Spring 2020 course “Women, Community and the Arts in Latin America: Oaxaca, Mexico”. Co-taught by Edith Wolfe, Assistant Director of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, and museum Director Monica Ramirez-Montagut, the class asked how Oaxacan socially-engaged artists and activists address the problems of gender-based violence and discrimination, economic hardship, access to education, family separation and other issues affecting their communities.
The student-curated show "Conexión: Art and Activism in Oaxaca, Mexico" documents how community-based projects in San Francisco de Tanivet and central parts of the city are shifting the narratives of human rights and empowerment, female authorship, immigration and childcare in the workplace. Examples cited include the civil society group Oaxaca Consortium for Parliamentary Dialogue and Equity that tracks missing women of the region, among other programs centered on gender equity; El Balcón, a space for children in the region’s largest market that functions as an education space, as a respite from child labor and as living theater; Las Hormigas Bordadoras de Tanivet, a group of women whose embroidered reflections on migration have become a means of economic survival and political resistance; and Guindhá Casa Taller, a community print workshop that creates a physical and social space for female artists.
