Aventuras de Oaxaca:
los artes, las poesias y más
Many thanks to the Mary Elvira Stevens Travel Fellowship and the Wellesley College Center for Career Education for supporting me during this once-in-a-lifetime journey visiting cultural sites, museums and artist studios in Oaxaca, Mexico from March-April 2024.
The connection to the history, people, land, intangible cultural heritage, words and imagery along the way has woven into new literary works I have created while there,
and am still creating since my return.
Thanks to watercolor workshops with artist Pedro Cruz Pacheco, I have expanded my artistic experimentations using this medium in my visual poetry. I have a deeper appreciation of locally hand-made paper from a studio I visited in San Miguel Etla, and use it for my collages and book arts projects. Specifically, I use these papers for applying hand paper-dye techniques such as orizomegami. I also learned local paper mache techniques to create unique artist book covers inspired by "dia de la muerte" and alebrijes at Ishuakara Casa Estudio in Oaxaca.
I also met with previous Stevens Travel Fellowship recipient Abigail Rothberg '01 to design locally hand-made papers using Japanese shibori techniques with all-natural indigo dye (the focus of her fellowship experience) which she produced at her home studio - about a thirty minute drive outside of Oaxaca City. I appreciated this organic collaboration and mutual exchange of cross-cultural learning experiences with Abigail who was not able to travel to Japan to learn about indigo dye practices there as she had planned to back in 2020 due to Covid travel restrictions. I am glad I was able to gift her with aizome omiyage ("souvenirs" in Japanese) from Tokushima which is renowned for traditional aizome/Japanese indigo dye. And I am grateful for Abigail's generosity in sharing her time and knowledge of indigo with me as we experimented with a new (for us both) paper-dye technique together in her home. To view photos of our indigo paper-dye session, click here!
I ended up using some of the indigo dyed paper I made at Abigail's home studio for my paper maiche covered artist books which includes pages of my watercolor talisman paintings I completed at Pedro's workshops and of a Spanish-language tanka I composed about the perros callejeros (street dogs) of Oaxaca.
Below are some examples of hand-made artist books of my own original art and poetry in Spanish inspired by iconography, street scenes and the vibrant cultures of Oaxaca.
Click here to view online photo albums chronicling my visits to various museums, cultural sites, and contemporary street art of Oaxaca.
The connection to the history, people, land, intangible cultural heritage, words and imagery along the way has woven into new literary works I have created while there,
and am still creating since my return.
Thanks to watercolor workshops with artist Pedro Cruz Pacheco, I have expanded my artistic experimentations using this medium in my visual poetry. I have a deeper appreciation of locally hand-made paper from a studio I visited in San Miguel Etla, and use it for my collages and book arts projects. Specifically, I use these papers for applying hand paper-dye techniques such as orizomegami. I also learned local paper mache techniques to create unique artist book covers inspired by "dia de la muerte" and alebrijes at Ishuakara Casa Estudio in Oaxaca.
I also met with previous Stevens Travel Fellowship recipient Abigail Rothberg '01 to design locally hand-made papers using Japanese shibori techniques with all-natural indigo dye (the focus of her fellowship experience) which she produced at her home studio - about a thirty minute drive outside of Oaxaca City. I appreciated this organic collaboration and mutual exchange of cross-cultural learning experiences with Abigail who was not able to travel to Japan to learn about indigo dye practices there as she had planned to back in 2020 due to Covid travel restrictions. I am glad I was able to gift her with aizome omiyage ("souvenirs" in Japanese) from Tokushima which is renowned for traditional aizome/Japanese indigo dye. And I am grateful for Abigail's generosity in sharing her time and knowledge of indigo with me as we experimented with a new (for us both) paper-dye technique together in her home. To view photos of our indigo paper-dye session, click here!
I ended up using some of the indigo dyed paper I made at Abigail's home studio for my paper maiche covered artist books which includes pages of my watercolor talisman paintings I completed at Pedro's workshops and of a Spanish-language tanka I composed about the perros callejeros (street dogs) of Oaxaca.
Below are some examples of hand-made artist books of my own original art and poetry in Spanish inspired by iconography, street scenes and the vibrant cultures of Oaxaca.
Click here to view online photo albums chronicling my visits to various museums, cultural sites, and contemporary street art of Oaxaca.