Sunday, February 26, 2012

Thanks to all the Cool Gente of Boulder and Denver for an Amazing MEXTASY Show!


Warm thanks to Arturo Aldama, profe extraordinaire, for curating a remarkable visit/show at the University of Colorado, Boulder--it was a big honor for me to be part of the "Decolonial Borderlands Distinguished Speakers Series" for the Department of Ethnic Studies there and I am grateful for the warm welcome and the brilliant folks I got to work with there in Colorado!

Friday, February 17, 2012

REPOST | MEXTASY: An Interview --> Mextasy comes to the University of Colorado, Boulder February 23, 2012 @ 5pm in Humanities 250

original posting 11/4/10 | revised 12/11/2010 | re-revised February 17, 2012
The Decolonial Borderlands Speakers Series, 2012 at CU Boulder
(Sponsored by The Department of Ethnic Studies)
Hosts William “Memo” Nericcio and his Crazy,Traveling Mini-exhibit 
¡MEXTASY!
--> Thursday, Feb 23, 5-7:00pm @ 
Humanities 250! Gratis!
info here!


An excerpt from an unpublished interview with Lorena Nava Ruggero

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 [Colorado]?

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.




Friday, February 10, 2012

The Decolonial Borderlands Speakers Series, 2012 at CU Boulder (Sponsored by The Department of Ethnic Studies) Hosts William “Memo” Nericcio and his Crazy, Traveling Mini-exhibit ¡MEXTASY! --> Thursday, Feb 23, 5-7:00pm @ 
Humanities 250! Gratis!




inal details are still in the works but it looks like this traveling cavalcade of stereotypes, art, resistance, comedy, and more will be landing in Boulder, Colorado on Thursday, February 23, 2011 at 5pm in Humanities 250 on the main campus of the University of Colorado, Boulder--the lecture is part of an ongoing series of talks, the Decolonial Borderlands Speakers Series in the Department of Ethnic Studies and will feature a rant/lecture, a review/presentation of the traveling Mextasy show, a book-signing, scandals, desmadres, chistes, licentious videos, annoying images, and more, more, more. If the audience is nice, I will share from my growing collection of bizarre caucasians!

The title of the talk?

"Between Textmex Agony and Xicanorgasmic Mextasy: 21st Century Latina/o Photography, Film, Art, and Literature OCCUPY Stereotypes, Now!"
Dr. William Anthony Nericcio


5:00 to 7:00pm
Humanities 250
Feb 23, 2012
University of Colorado at Boulder
FREE | Open to the Community