Transformative Arts Mexico presents Encantada opening February 16th
While the world insists on proof that we are busy to make us more worthy of attention, in the last year we rejected the model of "look at us" to more clearly affirm our founding mission of "we see you". We are unapologetic in our mission to serve through the arts and therefore are busy building Black geographies of care instead of building instagram pages.
Our work with the arts is deeply rooted in the communities where the legacies of aesthetics are often ignored in lieu of extractable capital. in these spaces, we have been busy recentering art as purpose. We have ongoing collaborations with community organizations and artists. We have presented our thinking and praxis at conferences. We have made and continue to make gatherings in the commons, outside the confines of authorized space. We have reconnected architecture to the diaspora through remembering, an ongoing counternarrative act. We do this with radical love for the arts and for our people.
Transformative Arts Mexico, Encantada is the newest site for our work to articulate contested geographies, landscapes and identities. Holding firm to counternarratives as an essential part of Black creativity and survival, we engage a fugitive framework that telegraphs the necessity to create art, community and relationships of care. On Encantada in Coyoacán, our project is to reconstitute the world-building life practice of Elizabeth Catlett (1915 – 2012), Mexico’s most prominent, yet underrepresented Black woman visual artist.
Elizabeth Catlett, or Betty to her friends and family, was born in Washington DC in 1915 and earned her MFA from the University of Iowa. She moved to Mexico City in 1946, and from 1959-1975, was a Professor of Sculpture, Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas at UNAM), where she became chair of the department. From 1963-1966 she also co-led the Taller de Grafica Popular with Celia Calderon and Mercedes Quevedo.
Transformative Arts Mexico Encantada opens February 16, 2025 to honor and reconstitute Catlett’s practice of inviting artists, scholars, musicians and activists to Mexico to rest and regroup. These brief encounters kept Catlett informed about her diasporic communities and introduced her guests to the robust resistance she was part of as a major force for change in Mexico and across the Global South.
Centering decolonial praxis, indigeneity and Black radical traditions, TA founder jill moniz has discovered that while Catlett shared her commitment to present and affirm the lives and struggles of Black and Brown people against colonialism and other mechanisms of power with her Mexican community, she recognized her own need to cultivate a diaspora, who through rest and reciprocity could help her to shape justice as an inclusive, expansive geography of making.
Encantada continues and builds on Catlett’s need to share her intellectual and aesthetic spaces of refusal and at the same time, welcome people who can feed their own ways of knowing through immersive experiences with Mexican art and artists.
TA Mexico at Encantada offers rest and reimagining at a time when artists need both to reflect and encourage their communities to find more equitable common ground. Inspired by Nezahualcoyotl, the Mexica poet who urged his people to give and grow meaning for the earth and humanity, A Memory that I Leave is painted on tile in the courtyard at Encantada to remind our artists in residence of the multiple legacies that thrive when we create, care and rest together.
Elizabeth Catlett, I have given the world my songs, from the I am a Negro Woman series, ‘45-47