A Second Home Called Oaxaca

I met Dan through the project “Montar la Bestia” by artist Demián Flores, which was presented at the USC Fisher Museum in 2017. Since then, we have collaborated with the two independent non-profit cultural spaces that each artist directs in their own country: Art Division located in Los Angeles and La Curtiduría in Oaxaca. Both centers, with similar objectives, work with young adults through education and artistic projects. They were created by visual artists Dan McCleary and Demián Flores, under the inspiration and teaching of ‘maestro’ Francisco Toledo, who founded numerous institutions that brought art and culture to the residents and visitors of Oaxaca at no cost; among them, the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca: a space that houses and protects numerous and important collection of prints that Toledo put together throughout his life and is now part of the cultural heritage of Mexico.

Oaxaca, one of the Mexican states with the greatest ethnic and cultural diversity, enjoys a very long history of artisans and art. The Zapotec and Mixtec cultures, in particular, are recognized for their creative mastery since prehistoric times; these are cultures that over centuries have maintained their own creative traditions but also adopted new techniques, materials, and influence from artists from other cultures with great success. Likewise, Oaxaca has not only been the cradle of great painters—the most prominent being Rufino Tamayo—its landscapes and indigenous towns have been a source of inspiration for great photographers like Graciela Iturbide and painters like Diego Rivera. 2006 was a critical year for Oaxacan society and art, starting with the conflict of the teachers who demanded better conditions in the schools and whose demands shook the Mexican state generating a wave of extreme violence; forced disappearances; police repression; and repression by the military against the civil population, social organizations, and schoolteachers. In that context, Demián