Several Prints, Most New, for the August-September MEXTASY Exhibition @ Adrian College in Michigan

click the images below and, poof, like magic, they expand!

Gael Garcia Bernal Mextasy Print Test

click to enlarge

Happy Birthday to Richie Valens!!!!

click to enlarge--original image source, Ruben Molina

A New Interview on the Border, on Textmex, Mextasy and Mucho Mas More--via DIVERSIONS!

hit the image for the interview via soundcloud--

on the left, Ciera Heimbigner, center, Bill Nericcio, right, Allie Schulz

diversions facebook page...

Heading "Home" to the Big Apple | Mextasy and Textmex Lectures in NYC, April 2013 | William Nericcio

It is weird to think of a trip to New York City as a "trip home"--but in a way, it is true.  The "professor" side of my consciousness will always be wandering the snowdrifts of Ithaca, New York, where I went to graduate school.  New York City, then, was a playground, a respite, a utopia, filled with friends and misadventures.

This coming week I am giving three lectures in Manhattan and Brooklyn.  First one up is a talk at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan entitled, "Bandit, Succubus, Gigolo, Maid, & Fiend: 20th and 21st Century Latina/o Bodies in the Imagination of the Americas"--it is a variation and augmentation of a talk I gave at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada in 2011. The talk takes place at SVA on Tuesday, April 9, 2011 at 1pm and is part of their Working Lunch series held at 136 West 21st Street, between 6th and 7nth Avenue.  Hit the poster opposite for details.

Next up, on Thursday evening @ 7pm is "Narcheology" a new piece in development for Eyegiene, my new book with UT Press. The full title is "Visual Narcheology: Scarface, Semiotics, and Spectacles of Violence in Northern Mexico and the American Southwest." This talk is at NYU's 20 Cooper Square building, conference room 471 at 7pm and is part of Professor Josefina Saldaña's seminar on narcos. Tap the image opposite with your cursor to see the details.

Last up is the talk at the amazing Observatory Room in Brooklyn. There, I will be giving a revised feature presentation I just gave up the coast at the University of Washington, "Confessions of a Mexican American Hoarder or the Caucasian Bestiary: The Existential and Insane Consquences of Collecting Stereotypes." More details on the presentation are on the Facebook invite page and here, opposite.

Please help me spread the word--I would very much like to bring the entire Mextasy exhibition to NYC in the near future!  Gracias!

New Pedro Infante Mextasy Poster for the Grossmont Gig, Tuesday, April 30, 2013, from 12:30 - 1:45 p.m @ Griffin Gate

More on the Grossmont College

Mextasy Presentation HERE...

Bring Mextasy to Your Gallery or University! Mextasy, the Traveling Exhibition Based on the Book Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America

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.

Thank you Seattle!!!!!

A quick GRACIAS from me and Topo Gigo (!) for the amazing welcome given me by Professor Tony Lucero and his amazing band of colleagues, graduate students, and undergraduates in the Simpson School of the Humanities in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington!!!!