Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Happy New Year, and Feliz Año (not Ano!) Nuevo from all the Folks at the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog, 2014!

 

What a year it has been! Mextasy, the pop-up Art Gallery/Exhibition continues to expand with upcoming shows in Dallas @ Richland College, February 2015, in Mexington (aka Lexington), Kentucky in April 2015, with mucho mas more to come!

Also on the horizon?!  Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Mextasy might just be coming to the boobtube, to television, with a weekly show based on Tex[t]-Mex, the book, and Mextasy, the exhibition. Follow our trials and tribulations here...

https://www.facebook.com/MextasyTV

...and on @eyegiene via twitter!

Have an amazing 2015!

Yours,

William A. Nericcio y

Guillermo Nericcio García

Los Hollywood! David Tomas Martinez! Perry Vasquez! y Mucho Mas More at the Mextasy Fiesta/Birthday Party at Mi Barra, December 5, 2014, Friday, from 8pm to ???

click to make way bigggggger!

Ok, don't tell anybody (swear now!) shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Friday, December 5, 2014 at Mi Barra- Rock En Español in glorious Chula Vista, Califas, we are planning a combined birthday party (don't ask how old I am!), concert, reading, filming, desmadre extravaganza as we celebrate the announcement of Mextasy TV, my crazy venture into the world of television and streaming media with Miguel-Angel Soria, Carlos Solorio, Gerardo Bola Juarez, Alex Balassa, and other secret angels (and devils)!!!!! 

RSVP via Facebook here!

The party will start around 9pm--spread the palabra and get out a pen and mark that calendar!!!! There will be music (Los Hollywood and the one and only Perry Vasquez performing from his opus, GATES OF HECK), readings by me and David Tomas Martinez, performance art, cerveza, cool peeps, surprises, desmadres, y mucho mas more!

map to Mi Barra: http://goo.gl/maps/paCvV
fiestalinkazo: https://www.facebook.com/events/1523793981201597

The ghost of Lupe Velez sez, "Go to Mi Barra"!!!

REPOSTING: KTEP's Focus on Campus Mextasy Show: Bill Nericcio and Louie Saenz! October 2014

When I was at UTEP for the Mextasy exhibition a few days back, I was lucky enough to be invited on the air of the local NPR station, KTEP, with an El Paso legend, the man of a million voices (look out, Mel Blanc, you've got competition!!!!), the one and only Louie Saenz.

Big love and huge abrazos to Louie and his cool producer, Norma Martinez, for making it happen!  Here's the show in its entirety:

{UPDATED} Mextasy Landing in El Paso, Texas (¡TEJAS!), Wednesday, October 15, 2014--Lecture, Performance, Signing, Desmadres!

Born and raised in the dusty, hot (then unpaved, thanks J.C. Martin) streets of Laredo, I have never really ventured to that other grand bordertown up the Rio Grande, El Paso, Texas! But that fault is remedied the third week of October with the traveling Mextasy roadshow venturing to UTEP--the University of Texas at El Paso. I will be the guest of the students and faculties of the departments of Communication and Chicana/o Studies there!  The main talk is at 5:30pm in Quinn Hall #212--it's free and open to the public. What to expect? Desmadres, readings, screenings, signings, hawking of posters, and some snippets from my new book Eyegiene!

new event poster: click to make mucho mas grande!

older event posters--click to make enlarge

What is "Mextasy"--A Primer for the UTEP Mextasy Show, October 15, 2014

click to expand

Mextasy: Seductive Hallucinations of Latina/o Mannequins Prowling the American Unconscious is a traveling art show/exhibit based on the work of William "Memo" Nericcio and Guillermo Nericcio García. The show, originally curated by Rachel Freyman Brown, South Texas College, McAllen, Texas, had its last exhibition at Boise State University, for the Third Cinema Research Group and El Consulado de México en Boise, Idaho on April 11, 2014. Its latest encarnation debuts for the Departments of Communication and Chicana/o Studies at the University of Texas, El Paso (UTEP) on October 15, 2014--the debut presentation is at 5:30 in Quinn Hall 212. 

Mextasy both reflects on and expands upon Nericcio's 2007 book with UT Press, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the Mexican in America. In addition to racist artifacts from American mass culture (the bread and butter of Uncle Sam's unconscious), the show also features works that "xicanosmotic," that is, works by Mexican-American artists where the delicious tattoo of the Mexican/US frontera is writ large as in the deliriously delicious semiotic tracings of Raul Gonzalez III, Perry Vasquez, Izel Vargas, and Marisela Norte.

Visitors to this page interested in having MEXTASY invade their local gallery/university of choice should contact us here. For more information and an interview with the curator/artist, go here.

An excerpt from an unpublished interview with Lorena Nava Ruggero, appears below. An other interview, focused more on the Eyegiene project, appears online on Agitprop.

LNR: What is Mextasy? Why did you create it?

WN: Mextasy is an art exhibition featuring outrageous stereotypes of Mexicans and other Latinas/os; additionally, it contains sculptures, drawings, photography, and other media that attack the notion of Mexicans as less-than-human in American mass culture. The show I opened along the Rio Grande river in McAllen (September, 2010) and in Laredo this December, Mextasy, is dedicated to the old motherland and my peculiar fatherland.

Mextasy is more than a representation of ecstasy about or for Mexico; it is about the sensuous tracings Mexican culture leaves both sides of the border. More existential state than archive, Mextasy speaks to the living organism of Mexicanicity as it moves between the bodies of Mexico and the United States--an overt and covert delicious miasma that arouses as it excites, excites as it provokes. ¡Que viva Mexico!, within and without its borders.

LNR: How does Mextasy parallel your book?

WN: Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America features over 200 illustrations, with 16 pages in full color; many of these illustrations are stock representations of Mexicans (the sleeping Mexican, the bandit Mexican, the hot, Latina femme fatale). However, the book also includes original art, digital, photographic and hand-drawn, created by me. You know English Professors are known more for tweed and pomposity than their Picasso-like skills--for that reason I publish all my art under the name of Guillermo Nericcio García, what my name would have been if I had been born 10 blocks south of where I came into the world in Laredo, Texas--a bordertown with Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas.

LNR: You're primarily a writer, but this is an art exhibit -- what was it like to create this kind of "content"?

WN: I have been drawing since I was three--I made my own comic book with my sister before I was ten; after that, I was the political cartoonist for my high school newspaper (most infamous drawing? of Vice-Principal Shoup as a zeigheiling facsist for his punitive pedagogy--I was almost expelled and the nuns at St. Augustine tried to censor the paper).

LNR: What will you focus on in your lectures in Texas (I noticed two speaking engagements at libraries)?

WN: I will be focusing on my ongoing forensic work on American visual culture--so I will be dealing with the image of Mexico in the United States but also with our changing optics-obsessed culture in general--from Avatar in 3-D to the IPad, we are living through a watershed moment in textual reproduction where the turn to the visual (the semiotic) is accelerating at a mind-blowing pace. Next year, my new book appears with the University of Texas Press; it is entitled Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race--parts of my talks will be drawn from that work.

LNR: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

WN: I love visiting South Texas--it is like a return to my roots; and though Northern Mexico and South Texas are in cultural chaos right now, the fallout of the Narco Wars hitting this locale hard, I think its important to remind yourself of where you come from. You would think that Southern California and South Texas are the same, but they are like worlds apart.

PAST MEXTASY EXHIBITIONS

Other recent Mextasy exhibitions include shows at (pre-boycott!) the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at La Casa Cultura Latina, the Centro Cultural de La Raza, in Balboa Park, San Diego, California; at Ann Arbor, Michigan for the Department of American Studies, University of Michigan; in San Ysidro, California (as Xicanoholic) at Casa Familiar; in McAllen, Texas at South Texas College's Pecan campus Art Gallery; at Laredo, Texas at the the Laredo Center of the Arts; additionally, it had an April 8, 2011 opening at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawai'i at Manoa; and a run at the Fullerton Public Library with Gustavo Arellano hosting! September 2011 saw Mextasy invade San Antonio College for a Tex[t]-Mex reading/signing and an exclusive South Texas MEXTASY exhibition. In 2012, Mextasy was sighted at Ohio State University; at the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario; at theFront, San Ysidro, California; and in Boulder, Colorado, at the University of Colorado for the Ethnic Studies Department. Western University, London, Ontario has also hosted a show, with other exhibitons and presentations at Adrian College, UCLA, and, this week, Boise State University.

original posting 11/4/10 | revised 12/11/2010 | Revised again, September 2011| 

Once again on Thursday, April 10, 2014 | and, still once again, October 4, 2014

MALAS, the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Collaborates with the English Department at San Ysidro High: MEXTASY: “Visiting-Professor-for-the-Day”/ “The Past, Present, and Future of Mexican, Mexican-American, and Latino/a Literature, Film, Photography, and Art on the Border and Beyond”

Just a quick note regarding MALAS's effort to collaborate with local area San Diego Schools:

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plain text:

PRESS RELEASE | Tuesday, September 16, 2014

MEXTASY

The MALAS High School Outreach Program

A Joint Community Engagement Initiative

Thursday, September 18, 2014

On Thursday, September 18, 2014, Dr. William “Memo” Nericcio, Director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences (MALAS), will be a “Visiting-Professor-for-the-Day” at San Ysidro High School, San Ysidro, California. From 10am to 4pm, Nericcio will hang with San Ysidro High English teacher Aaron Magnan and his amazing students, watching their presentations, and commenting on their work in class. At 2pm, there will be a feature lecture for the students entitled: “The Past, Present, and Future of Mexican, Mexican-American, and Latino/a Literature, Film, Photography, and Art on the Border and Beyond.”

William Nericcio is a Mexican-American public intellectual born in Laredo, Texas. With a BA in English from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA and PhD from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, Nericcio has worked in the United States and England for close to 25 years with appointments to the faculties of the University of Connecticut, the University of California, Riverside, the Foundation for International Education, London, and San Diego State University where he presently serves as Director, Master of Arts in Liberal Arts & Sciences (MALAS); Professor, English & Comparative Literature, Chicana/o Studies, and Latin American Studies; and Director, San Diego State University Press. He is the author of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the “Mexican” in America and Homer from Salinas: John Steinbeck's Enduring Voice for California. Mextasy: The MALAS High School Outreach Program is an extension of the Mextasy Exhibition: http://mextasy.blogspot.com

Contact Information:

Bill Nericcio, Director MALAS: Master of Arts in Liberal Arts & Sciences, College of Arts and Letters | Nasitir Hall 224 5500 Campanile Drive, mailcode: 4423 San Diego, CA 92182-4423 Phone: 619.594.1524 Fax: 619.594.4998 memo@sdsu.edu

Aaron Magnan, Chair English Department San Ysidro High School 5353 Airway Road San Diego, CA 92154 Phone: 619-710-2300 Fax: 619-710-2318 Aaron.Magnan@sweetwaterschools.org