Reed Johnson reports from Taxco, Mexico, on master silversmith Antonio Pineda, whose work has inspired a large retrospective, “Silver Seduction: The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio Pineda,” running through March 15 at UCLA's Fowler Museum. "Metallurgically speaking, it sounds paradoxical to talk about a 'Golden Age' of silversmithing. But the phrase comes naturally to Antonio Pineda as he recollects the era when his lustrous creations adorned heiresses' throats, commanded praise from heads of state and draped the creamy skin of Hollywood stars," writes Johnson.
Watch Pineda in the video above, and read the written report here.
Click here for more posts on the arts and here for more on Mexico.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Times staff writer Agustin Gurza writes: Gregorio Luke approaches with a contented grin, reaches into the vest pocket of his black business suit and hands me a business card as if we had never met before. "It's something very special," says the former director of the Museum of Latin American Art, whom I've known for almost a decade, writes Agustin Gurza.
It's a plain white card with his name in black ink. No title, no logos, no affiliations. "It's taken me 25 years to get a card like that, just me, not associated with anybody," says the one-time Mexican diplomat. "It's taken me 25 years to have the courage to reclaim my freedom and my identity."
A dramatic entrance is expected of Luke, one of the most dynamic and interesting figures in the local Latino arts scene with a reputation as a charismatic lecturer. During his tenure at MOLAA in Long Beach, he became the museum's most visible promoter and often its main attraction, especially with his popular multimedia presentations on Mexican painters, "Murals Under the Stars." After he resigned last year to take his show on the road, the museum started seeming a little more sedate.
Now, he's taken on a new challenge at the Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture.
Read more about Luke's new job here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
 Perez Celis, an Argentine painter, sculptor and muralist whose highly visible works adorned museums, banks, airports and universities as well as soccer stadiums and wine bottles, died of leukemia Aug. 2 at a clinic in Buenos Aires. He was 69.
Read the Washington Post story here. Celis had burst into prominence by the early 1960s and became a prolific exhibitor in galleries and museums from Buenos Aires to New York. Although widely known for his abstract pieces, he declined to be identified with any prevailing fashions or trends in the art world.
During the rise of Pop Art in the early '60s -- exemplified by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg -- Celis immersed himself in the indigenous art tradition of Argentina and Peru. In later years, he turned to more figurative designs from his studio in Miami.
Besides his skillful use of light and shadow, Celis' work resonated with many observers for its assertive, often juxtaposed geometric lines. He said such bold features were inspired by extended visits to the horizontal plains of the Argentine pampas and later to Caracas, Paris and New York, cities where the vertical skylines dominated the horizon.
-- Reed Johnson in Mexico City
Photo: Perez Celis, standing before one of his paintings, had more than 120 solo shows during his career, and his art was purchased for many private collections and first-rate museums. Credit: Anita Shapolsky Gallery and Art
"Certain images of migrants almost have become clichés in our globalized world of perpetual human movement: Mexican families sloshing across the Rio Grande in the dead of night, young African men huddled over dull campfires in Spanish detainee camps," writes the L.A. Times' Reed Johnson.
"But other, less commonplace images challenge preconceived ideas of what it means to be an undocumented worker, 'illegal alien' or simply a person with no fixed home or identity, stranded between shifting borders."
Narrated slideshow:
"As illustrated by 'Laberinto de Miradas' (Labyrinth of Glances), a provocative photo and video exhibition that's on display here at the Cultural Center of Spain through August, immigration today wears many faces. It's a middle-class Argentine woman, driven into exile by her country's 2001 peso collapse. A Cuban man who bears the scars of jail time served for trying to flee to Miami. Hundreds of Brazilians of mixed ethnicities, body types and attitudes, mostly economic refugees from other parts of the country, all crammed into a ramshackle São Paulo apartment building, striving to co-exist."
Click here to read the full story on the immigration-themed exhibition.
For more on immigration, click here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Christopher Knight, Times Art Critic, pays a visit to the new Pre-Columbian collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Read on »
 Times Art Critic Christopher Knight reviews the Wilfredo Lam show at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.
The Cuban painter "was Creole -- Afro-Spanish on his mother's side, Cantonese on his father's -- and that hybrid identity is reflected in his art," writes Knight. "Lam is one of those second-tier Modern artists -- there are a lot of them -- whose work rarely fails to impress when it is encountered but isn't encountered nearly often enough. Out of sight, out of mind, his paintings have become perpetual surprises."
Click here to read the whole review of the Wilfred Lam show at the Museum of Latin American Art.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Image: "Woman With Long Hair, I" from 1938, is among the works in "Wifredo Lam in North America" at the Museum of Latin American Art. Credit: Museum of Latin American Art
Reed Johnson of the Los Angeles Times pays a visit to a solo art exhibition in Mexico City by painter Daniel Lezama. He writes: Which adjective best fits the work of painter Daniel Lezama?
Alluring? Repellent? Classical? Irreverent? Misunderstood?
While critics extol his daring and originality, Lezama, 40, makes certain gallery owners squeamish and collectors nervous. His typically large-scale works are imposing in their size and complexity, startling in their frank depictions of frequently nude, mainly working-class Mexicans (including children) engaged in activities that are simultaneously violent and sordid, touching and tender.
Read the full report here...
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Artist Daniel Lezama poses in front of a painting titled "Amor Eterno," part of the exhibit "La Madre Prodiga," showing through the end of June at the Museum of Mexico City. Stylistically and thematically, Lezama’s art straddles several eras, making some observers regard him as a backward-looking figurative painter, while others see him as a contemporary iconoclast. In truth, he’s a thoroughly modern anti-modernist or, as Erick Castillo, curator of the exhibit, has described him, a “traditionalist heretic working for the nocturnal legacy of the Mexican unconsciousness.” Sarah Meghan Lee / Los Angeles Times
 They're separated stylistically and generationally by a wide gulf. But an exhibition of work by Cuban artists Carlos Luna and the late Wilfredo Lam (1902-1982) at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach affords some striking comparisons.
"The identity of being Cuban is not a one-way road," painter and sculptor Luna tells The Times' Mindy Farabee in this story.
"After all," Farabee writes, "modern Cuba is a conglomeration of Spanish, African and Indian elements, a mixed culture influenced by slave trading and the international sugar cane market. And though the works of Luna and the late Lam may differ in focus and style, Luna says, they both address 'a very essential part of Cuban life, which stems from certain traditions and mixture.' "
Image: Wifredo Lam's untitled painting, circa 1947, is one of many in an exhibition at MOLAA dedicated to the late Cuban artist. Also on view in a parallel show are the works of Carlos Luna. Credit: Museum of Latin American Art
-- Reed Johnson in Mexico City
 "Two of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara's children said Thursday they were tired of seeing their father's image used to sell everything from T-shirts to vodka, calling the growth of the revolutionary as a global super-brand "embarrassing." The Associated Press story is here.
Aleida Guevara, the eldest of Guevara's four children by his second wife, Cuban revolutionary Aleida March, said the commercialization of her father's image contributed to tension between rich and poor in some countries.
"Something that bothers me now is the appropriation of the figure of Che that has been used to make enemies from different classes. It's embarrassing," she wrote during an Internet forum sponsored by Cuba's government ahead of what would have been her father's 80th birthday on June 14.
Here's a recent L.A .Times story on the mass marketing of Che.
-- Reed Johnson in Mexico City
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Chris Kraul
Buenos Aires:
Patrick McDonnell
Caribbean:
Carol Williams
Mexico City:
Hector Tobar
Deborah Bonello
Marla Dickerson
Ken Ellingwood
Reed Johnson
San Diego:
Richard Marosi
Washington:
Nicole Gaouette