Art, Music & Culture
Filmmaker Alex Rivera Named MacArthur Fellow
October 1, 2021—Alex Rivera, the filmmaker who last October delivered the CLLAS Distinguished Lecture The Border as a Way of Seeing and also led a CLLAS teach-in, has been selected as a 2021 MacArthur Fellow. Known popularly as the MacArthur “genius grant,” the Fellowship is a $625,000 “no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.” Twenty-five people from a variety of disciplines were selected this year to receive this prestigious award.
The MacArthur Foundation website lists three criterion for selection of Fellows: 1) exceptional creativity; 2) promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments; 3) potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.
Rivera has been telling ground-breaking Latinx stories for more than twenty years. His first feature film, a cyberpunk thriller set in Tijuana, Mexico, Sleep Dealer, won multiple awards at Sundance and was screened around the world. Rivera’s second feature film, a documentary/scripted hybrid set in an immigrant detention center, The Infiltrators, won both the Audience Award and the Innovator Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Rivera’s work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Tribeca Film Institute, and the Open Society Institute, among many other sources.
NUESTRA IMAGEN ACTUAL | OUR PRESENT IMAGE: MEXICO AND THE GRAPHIC ARTS 1929-1956
Museum Exhibit
October 3, 2020 to February 14, 2021
For more information, go to: https://jsma.uoregon.edu/NuestraImagenActual
Resistance as Power: A Curatorial Response to Under the Feet of Jesus – University of Oregon
The JSMA’s fourth “Common Seeing” exhibition supports the UO’s 2019-20 “Common Reading” of Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena Maria Viramontes. In the book, the resilient protagonist,13-year-old Estrella, works in the hot California grape fields while navigating the realities of first love, financial struggle, family separation, and illness. For more information about the “Common Reading,” including upcoming university events, visit commonreading.uoregon.edu. Two special loans from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) by artists Emanuel Martinez and Domingo Ulloa anchor the exhibition. Martinez created Farm Workers’ Altar (1967) for the Catholic Mass held in Delano, California, at which labor activist César Chávez broke his twenty five-day fast in 1968. Ulloa, “The Father of Chicano Art,” painted Braceros (1960) after visiting a labor camp in Holtville, California. From 1942 through 1964, the U.S. government invited agricultural workers from Mexico for limited-duration assignments to relieve the worker shortage caused by World War II. Ulloa presented a sobering view of the reality of life for these braceros (from the Spanish for “one who works using his arms,” implying manual labor), who experienced poor working conditions, crowded living quarters, and other challenges while employed in the United States. These special loans provide historical and cultural touchstones for Viramontes’s 1995 novel and contemporary works from the JSMA’s permanent collection, including recent acquisitions by Ester Hernández, Victor Maldonado, and Lilliam Nieves.
Resistance as Power: A Curatorial Response to Under the Feet of Jesus is one in a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the Art Bridges + Terra Foundation Initiative.
Source: Resistance as Power: A Curatorial Response to Under the Feet of Jesus – University of Oregon
Ernesto Martínez’s short film “La Serenata” an award finalist
July 31, 2019—Ernesto Martínez’s short film, La Serenata, is a finalist in the Imagen Foundation Short Film and Web Series Awards.
You can support this film by voting below and inviting friends and family to vote as well (one vote per 24 hours). You could also watch the film at this site: https://www.imagen.org/vote/short-films/
Film synopsis: two parents struggle with their beloved Mexican musical tradition when their son requests a love song for another boy.
Ernesto Martínez is an associate professor in the UO Department of Ethnic Studies. CLLAS supported Martínez’s work on this film and a related children’s book with its inaugural Latinx Studies Seed Grant.
Melissa Lozada-Oliva: CLLAS Latinx Heritage Month Events
| October 9, 2019 | ||
| 10:00 am | to | 11:00 am |
| 4:00 pm | to | 5:00 pm |
A teach-in and poetry slam on campus
CLLAS Teach-In: Language and Poetry as Resistance, October 9, 10am-11am, Knight Library Browsing Room
CLLAS Latinx Heritage Month Poetry Slam by Melissa Lozada-Oliva, October 9, 4pm-5pm, 240C McKenzie Hall
Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a spoken-word poet, author, and educator. Her book Peluda (Button Poetry 2017) explores the intersections of Latina identity, feminism, hair removal & what it means to belong. She performs her poems in hundreds of universities & venues across the country. She also does workshops on incorporating humor into poetry & general creative writing classes. Lozada-Oliva is the co-host of podcast Say More with Olivia Gatwood and her work has been featured in REMEZCLA, The Guardian, Vulture, Bustle, Glamour Magazine, The Huffington Post, Muzzle Magazine, The Adroit Journal, and BBC Mundo. She lives in New York City.
Sponsored by CLLAS. Cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Women in Society and other UO units.
These events are part of the CLLAS two-year theme (2019-2021): “The Politics of Language in the Americas: Power, Culture, History, and Resistance.”
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