Oaxaca has really done a remarkable job.
The galleries, the museums are some of the best in the country and it was basically the
efforts of Francisco Toledo, a leading artist, and of Alejandro de Avila who is a compadre
of Francisco Toledo and they were able to convince the city council, the politicians,
of making decisions on museums and galleries rather than going the commercial kind of way.
Toledo was famous for keeping a McDonalds out of the zocalo, the city square, saying
that this is the kind of thing we do not need.
Tourists do not come to have a McDonalds.
They want to see Oaxaca.
One of the things that Toleo did in particular was he brought over Finnish paper makers to
establish a paper-making operation but using the plants and materials that the q come from Oaxaca.
Toledo asked me to design jewelry that the people working here could reproduce.
And I said "oh no, I can't possibly do that."
But of course he put that idea out there so that's how it started.
I didn't intend to be a jewelry.
I didn't regard jewelry very highly to be frank.
But my husband and I first came to Oaxaca almost 50 years ago.
At that time we went to Monte Alban.
We went very early one morning and it was very calm, very peaceful.
No one else there and it was fantastic.
We saw the jewelry from Tomb 7.
It made a deep impression.
It was the intimacy of the small scale and its impact that stayed with me, although it
had nothing to do with "oh I'm going to make jewelry."
It's more now I see the seed was planted.
With this piece I'm trying to figure out how to make the curve correct.
The building was originally a hydroelectric plant in the 19th century.
It's a great place for making paper since you need the water.
So always you have the sound of the water here.
In a way I really was working in the beginning as a teacher of design and this is not so
much related to the way I work in metal which is completely different.
This is my petri dish.
There's no great value in any individual objects but there's something that can happen from
looking at the juxtapositions of these things.
I was never attracted to the preciousness idea of jewelry, of diamonds, golds in the. material.
What I valued were things that were maybe overlooked or disregarded in the culture,
and I began to use some of those material.
I'm often put in that place that I worked with found objects but Ithink in some ways I'm
difficult to categorize or define within the jewelry movement.
For me it's not the technique of how I make the thing, but the why I make something.
And if something doesn't have vitality for me then there's no point.
so the why is more important than how.
If you really look at Chicago now you can see how the mexican immigrants and community
have greatly affected, in a positive way, the fabric of the city.
One of the most important ideas that this museum has had is the concept of "sin fronteras."
What that basically means is there are no borders when it comes to culture, when it comes to community.
Borders do not exist in the arts.
The strength of artwork is that in can create bridges, it can show you what you have in
common with all humanity and it can do it in a very subtle and quiet way.
This museum's relationship with Francisco Toledo goes way back.
The museum was a year old in 1988 and we displayed the very first solo exhibition of Maestro
Toledo in a museum in the United States.
And it just made so much sense, almost thirty years later, to open our gallery doors to
the more recent work of the Maestro Toledo studios.
This recent work from Casa, Casa being the cultural arts center in San Agustin, outside
of Oaxaca City that was founded by Maestro Toledo, and the works that are on our walls
come from that space.
They worked felt and many other materials that are traditional, yet the way they do
it is very, very contemporary.
There were many hands that were a part of the creation of these works, btu there was
one vision, there was one one mind behind it, that would've been Francisco Toledo.
There was a similarity in how he set up the felt workshop to the paper workshop.
Sometimes he has ways of bringing out the best use of these materials in an expressive
way and he has a much wider view than a single media, a single technique, a single means
of expression.
I think that Toledo is always seeing, looking for, making connections - for his personal
exploration but also for the survival, for the vitality of the culture that he cares
so much about in Oaxaca.
I'm not sure he likes the term activist, but I think of him as that, as a cultural activist.
There are two kinds of borders borders in the minds and physical borders, and often
it is art and artists who cross those borders and exchange way more easily than most.
And to do it maybe indirectly, through this very humble project, gives me the opportunity
to advocate for may things really - for jewelry, for art, for fewer borders.