Etherton Gallery is excited to announce that we are exhibiting at the tenth anniversary edition of EXPO CHICAGO, the international exposition of contemporary and modern art, April 13-16, 2023, in Booth 153 at the Navy Pier Festival Hall in Chicago. Over 170 leading galleries representing 36 countries and 90 cities from around the world will exhibit at EXPO CHICAGO, which drew over 30,000 visitors in 2022.
The gallery will present an extraordinary collection of 20th century Mexican photography by Tina Modotti (1896–1942), Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902-2002), Graciela Iturbide (b. 1942), Rodrigo Moya (b. 1934), and others. “I am thrilled to represent Tucson with a world class collection of Mexican photography at EXPO CHICAGO,” said Terry Etherton, Gallery Director and Owner of Etherton Gallery. “Over the last 42 years, the gallery has built an international reputation for its expertise in this area.”
Highlights of the Etherton Gallery exhibition will include a rare vintage gelatin silver print of Tina Modotti’s El Machete Office and Mexican Communist Party Headquarters, 1927. This print was exhibited in Tina Modotti and Edward Weston: The Mexico Years at the Barbican Art Galleries in 2003. Modotti’s photographic career lasted only seven years, from 1923-1930, but she had a profound impact on Mexican photography. Combining formal rigor with social and political concerns, the image depicts the headquarters of the Mexican Communist party and its newspaper, El Machete. Modotti served as an editor, translator and photographer for El Machete, and made the photograph the same year she joined the Communist party.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo took over many of Modotti's publishing assignments after she was deported in 1930. The work he produced during his 80-year career is foundational to Mexican photography. During the 1930s, Bravo made images of daily life in Mexico City with an eye for the ironic and uncanny. In 1938, André Breton, leader of the French Surrealist movement, commissioned the cover of the catalogue of the International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City. The resulting image, La Buena Fama Durmiendo (Good Reputation Sleeping), 1939 will be among the Bravo photographs on display at EXPO CHICAGO. In La Buena Fama Durmiendo, Bravo created a staged image on the rooftop of the Academy of San Carlos, where he taught photography. Inspired by the bandages used by dancers to wrap their limbs, he wrapped his model, Alicia, with bandages provided by a local doctor. He asked a security guard to buy a star cactus. The Spanish term for star cactus – abrojos – can also mean “abre – ojos,” or eye(s) wide open. However, in the picture, Alicia is asleep and unaware of the threat posed by the thorny star cactus to her exposed skin. By juxtaposing the co-existence of rural traditions with city life, Bravo made the familiar seem unfamiliar, fusing potent Mexican cultural symbols with a new photographic language.
Juchitán is a “mythical” place that had been visited by Modotti, Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, film maker Sergei Eisenstein, and painter Frida Kahlo, before Graciela Iturbide photographed the pre-Hispanic Zapotec community in Oaxaca. Iturbide studied photography with Manuel Álvarez Bravo. In 1979 she traveled to Juchitán at the invitation of Oaxacan artist and cultural activist, Francisco Toledo, to make photographs for the Casa de Cultura (Cultural Center), immersing herself in the center of Juchitec life, the public market managed and controlled by local women. She lived with them and photographed their daily routines. In the process, she discovered one of the unique aspects of Juchitec culture -- its openness to muxes -- men who dress as women, referred to as a Zapotec third gender. Magnolia con sombrero (Magnolia with Sombrero), Juchitán, 1986, is a portrait of Magnolia, made up, and wearing a black dress whose lacy hem mimics the stitching in her sombrero. It manifests the quality of “complicity” or mutual engagement between photographer and subject, that characterizes Iturbide’s work. Magnolia is the co-author of her image, photographed at her request, and in the clothes and make up she chose. Iturbide’s photographs of Juchitán mark an important milestone in her career, earning her international recognition including, the W. Eugene Smith Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the grand prize in the 1988 Mois de la Photo (Month of Photography) in Paris. Etherton Gallery’s exhibition at EXPO CHICAGO will include iconic images from Juchitán and other parts of Mexico, India, and Los Angeles, self-portraits, images of birds, and recent landscapes from Japan.
Working in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Rodrigo Moya covered political unrest throughout Latin America during the 1950s and 60s. Later, he turned his focus to print journalism. Moya brought the human cost of civil and military uprisings to the pages of magazines such as Impacto, El Espectador, Politica, Sucesos and Siempre! In La vida no es bella (Life isn´t beautiful), 1965 he created a compassionate but respectful representation of the daily struggle of agricultural workers. The photograph depicts the rough, dirty and calloused hands of a rural laborer who eked out a living by gathering ixtle in the Chihuahuan Desert. His hands are a powerful symbol of hard, manual labor. Moya’s sympathetic perspective also gave him unique access to political and military opposition groups. After seeing his portrait and street protest shots, the Venezuelan guerrilla group, Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, asked him to photograph them. Moya hiked for 48 hours into the Venezuelan jungle and shared their camp, creating a portrait of the rebels as a ‘band of brothers,’ in Guerrilleros en la niebla (Guerrillas in the mist), Sierrade Falcón Venezuela, 1966. Etherton Gallery will present a selection of Rodrigo Moya's most iconic images, including his portraits of the charismatic Che Guevara.
Other photographers represented in the Etherton Gallery booth will include: Kati Horna (1912-2000), Paul Strand (1890-1976), H. J. Gutierrez (1878-1934), and Augustín Casasola (1874-1938). Join us in Booth 153 at EXPO CHICAGO, April 13-16, and experience an unparalleled exhibit of Mexican photography.
For more information contact Etherton Gallery, 520-624-7370 or info@ethertongallery.com
