Doña Inés Lost Her Slipper
I am a Latino artist who felt compelled to create an exhibition about a complex personal history that had haunted me all my life. My father was from Spain and my mother from Northern New Mexico. I spent significant amounts of time with my Chippewa grandmother (an itinerant BIA elementary school teacher) in Taos, New Mexico, and went for several years to the Indian Day School on the reservation. After those experiences, I studied and lived in Spain and France, and I felt a need to develop an exhibition which explored the complexity, challenges, and rewards that come from growing up in a multi-ethnic and cultural household. Having grown up in these various, disparate places, this project in a sense is a way for me to reconcile those identities, and to explore a poignant and fascinating past that unites many of us, who are the children of those first encounters.
A beautiful and strange portrait I saw of an aristocrat at the Prado Museum gave birth to a project, one exploring the idea of aristocracy, beauty, class, slavery, colonial rule, and their impact on today’s multi-ethnic society. I started to imagine a fictional account of a Spanish aristocrat who arrives in the New World, and finds herself confronted with a Native American maidservant, who is there against her will, but who becomes complicit in Doña Inés’ secret life.
The maidservant is Native American, and the works in the exhibition weave a story about her experiences in a colonial household: her coping with a new situation, reaffirming her identity, and eventually striving to emancipate herself in an imagined and/or real way. This exhibition is the record of those thoughts and her struggle. It is also about Doña Inés, the idiosyncratic aristocrat, who finds herself secretly vulnerable and lost in this new world and environment, The flattened identities of the servants/slaves recalls contemporary work by artists such as Kara Walker, and echoes the brutal hierarchical structure of Spanish colonial America as represented by Mexican “Castas” painting, where all possible racial mixtures were clearly enunciated in images showing two parents and a child. Despite obvious political implications of the project, it strives to inhabit an aesthetic space revealing a more complex picture than simply oppression/repression, master/slave dynamics. It will also explore the channels of complicit and interconnected lacework entangling both those in positions of privilege and those serving them. It would fundamentally address the histories of many of us, who are composites of these entangled relational structures.
I ran a successful kickstarter campaign for Doña Inés and the exhibition has travelled internationally to the various venues shown below:
Doña Inés Lost Her Slipper
Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid, Madrid, Spain. May 17-August 30, 2018, curated by Isabel Bettina Caparrós
Musée Arts et Histoire, Bormes-les-Mimosas, France
June 16-July17, 2017
Santa Fe Community College--Visual Arts Gallery
October 30, 2014-February 10, 2015
RI/SCATTI:
Donna Ines ha perso la scarpina
Palazzo Nicolaci, Noto (Sicily), Italy
July (luglio) 4-30 2015
Opening/Inaugurazione July 4th
FESTIVAL EFFETTO NOTO 2015
curator Vincenzo Medica
critical review Ornella Fazzina
KoArt: unconventional place
via San Michele 28
Catania, Italy
October/November 2015
Studio Barnum
via Silvio Spaventa, 4
Noto, Italy
Doña Inés Lost Her Slipper video
Direction: Francisco Benitez
Editing and Camera: Mari Angulo
Press
Review by Lauren Tresp for THE Magazine
For the Pasatiempo article, click here:
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/art/gallery_openings/my-spanish-new-world-cinderella-imagined-women-from-two-classes/article_6225518e-db01-5240-b2f0-d177aff6405f.html?_dc=358548356918.6181&_dc=678875926416.3673
For the Albuquerque Journal North article, click here
http://www.abqjournal.com/485162/entertainment/worlds-2.html
Additional Images:
Doña Inés at SFCC Installation
Doña Inés at the Palazzo Nicolaci
Review by Lauren Tresp for THE Magazine
For the Pasatiempo article, click here:
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/art/gallery_openings/my-spanish-new-world-cinderella-imagined-women-from-two-classes/article_6225518e-db01-5240-b2f0-d177aff6405f.html?_dc=358548356918.6181&_dc=678875926416.3673
For the Albuquerque Journal North article, click here
http://www.abqjournal.com/485162/entertainment/worlds-2.html
Additional Images:
Doña Inés at SFCC Installation
Doña Inés at the Palazzo Nicolaci

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