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

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:

click to enlarge

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

What is "Mextasy"? Boise State University Exhibition/Lecture for the Third Cinema Research Group and El Consulado de México en Boise, Idaho | April 11, 2014 @ 7pm

click to enlarge

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, has just finished a one month run at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at La Casa Cultura Latina . It has previously toured at 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.

Mextasy both reflects 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.

original posting 11/4/10 | revised 12/11/2010 | Revised again, September 2011| Once again on Thursday, April 10, 2014

Textmex, Mextasy, Eyegiene, and Technosexualities on the Road in the Land of Blue Turf! Lecture/Signing/Exhibition at Boise State University, April 11 @ 7pm! "Orgasmic, Semiotic Cataclysms of Eyegiene and Mextasy: Digressions of Film Studies, Ethnic Studies, & Cultural Studies in the Televisual, Techno-Ontologicial Age of the Smartphone"

...a new poster for the MEXTASY gig @ Boise State just launched!

click to enlarge

Friday, April 11, 2014 at 7pm, I will be in the Farnsworth Room in the Student Union Building on the campus of Boise State University for a lecture/exhibition fusing my past and more recent researches into the sprawling miasma Tex[t]-Mex, Mextasy, Eyegiene, and Technosexualities.  The improbable and ungainly title I have used to lasso together this hoarder's treasure trawl of cultural studies goodies is "Orgasmic, Semiotic Cataclysms of Eyegiene and Mextasy." As if that was not enough, I tacked on a subtitle for good measure: "Digressions of Film Studies, Ethnic Studies, & Cultural Studies in the Televisual, Techno-Ontologicial Age of the Smartphone."  Can't wait to see Ralph Clare, Professor, Boise State, and a former student of mine back in the day on Montezuma Mesa, read that title aloud!

In any event, I will be selling, signing (and drawing cartoons) into copies of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America, and prints from the Mextasy show at the lecture--in you are a Latina/o-loving, cultural studies maven trapped in the wilds of Idaho, come on down!

The original poster appears below--the updated one with all the proper thankyous appears opposite--click to make more bigger or go here for a high-res version.

¡high-res linkazo!

click to enlarge

¡high-res linkazo!

last promotional poster variant

MEXTASY 2014: Mextasy Show on Exhibition for Three More Weeks at La Casa Cultural Latina, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign!

UPDATE: March 3, 2014! Great News! Mextasy @ the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's LA CASA CULTURAL LATINA has been extended for three weeks through March 21, 2014! The show is free and on exhibition in the main rooms of LA CASA! Gracias Gracias Gracias to all the fine gente/folks in the snowy fields of the Midwest for extending such a warm welcome to MEXTASY.

-------------------------------------------------

From Tex[t]-Mex to Mextasy to Eyegiene

Televisually Supercharged Hallucinations of 'Mexicans' in our Digital Humanities-laced, Technosexually Voyeuristic Tomorrow(s)

In a wide-ranging talk that builds on the work found in  Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of“Mexicans” in America (2007), but that also incorporates the traveling exhibition (and pop-up rascuache museum entitled Mextasy), and looks forward to my new project entitled Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race, I will try to immerse students, faculty, and community members from the University of Illinois in some of the crazy story of metamorphosis that forms the history of Tex[t]-Mex, what began as a response to the laughter of racist students on the East Coast snickering at the concept of "Mexican Intellectuals," has ended up as a career-long sojourn, an Odyssey-like conquest, to track down and vivisect Latina/o stereotypes in American mass culture.  More recently, the work has evolved, concerning itself more less with issues of ethnocentrism and race and more with what I call technosexual "subject-effects," watchfully surveilling the evolution of human entertainment as it concerns itself less with "the other" and more with the "OS" (think here of Spike Jonze's awesome new movie Her).  There too, however, the massive hangover from European and American genocide, slavery, and racism, will continue to evolve and morph, finding new manifestations in the digital age of smartphones.  Ultimately, this is a lecture about metamorphosis, a movement in my work from an outright focus on deleterious stereotypes into a brave new world filled with the hedonistic pleasures of mextasy.  This, then, is a lecture that tries to capture our contemporary ontology in flux, from "I think therefore I am" to "I see, therefore I must record and broadcast, in order to be--Descartes credo reborn and re-imagined for the high age, the sacred moment of the "selfie."

All Mextasy event/lectures are all free/gratis!

Some prints, new and old, for the show...

Original Posting February 25, 2014

Guillermo Nericcio García y William A. Nericcio 

are Invading the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign 

on Thursday, February 27, 2014 at 5:30pm 

@ La Casa Cultural Latina!!! 

Help Spread la Palabra!

as with all the images on this blog, click to enlarge

Click the poster and watch it grow!

poster for the mextasy exhibition, u of illinois urbana-champaign

Mextasy Coming to Illinois! Thursday, February 27, 2014 ~ Guillermo Nericcio García y William A. Nericcio! Desmadres y Mucho Mas More!

Mextasy comes to the wilds of Illinois Thursday, February 27, 2014, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's LA CASA CULTURA LATINA from 5:30-7:30pm... 

here's a recent interview with some background on the show...

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 [Illinois]?

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.

 

Guillermo Nericcio García y William A. Nericcio are Invading the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign on Thursday, February 27, 2014 at 5:30pm @ La Casa Cultural Latina!!! Help Spread la Palabra!

Guillermo Nericcio García y William A. Nericcio are Invading the 

University of Illinois Urbana Champaign on Thursday, 

February 27, 2014 at 5:30pm @ La Casa Cultural Latina!!! 

Help Spread la Palabra!

More soon!