Rini Templeton. Notes
arkheia
Genealogies and Dissidences. MUAC Collection
The militant artist Rini Templeton (Buffalo, 1935-Mexico City, 1986) developed her artistic practice alongside the social movements of the sixties, seventies and eighties. She visually accompanied the Cuban Revolution, the Chicano movement, the Nicaraguan Revolution and countless struggles of peasants, workers and unions in Mexico and the United States.
This exhibition seeks to recover her work processes, itineraries and commitments as a creator of images through an exhaustive review of her notebooks, held by the Rini Templeton Collection at MUAC’s Arkheia Documentation Center.
The pencil, acrylic, ink and marker drawings became the basis for the photocopies that Templeton herself provided to social organizations so that they would circulate in publications, rallies and marches ―a process that she called Xerox art―. These notebooks constitute an artistic and documentary record of the everyday activities of the organizations and the agents she collaborated with, an aspect that has been overlooked by the twentieth-century tradition of graphic political art.
For the past decade and a half, MUAC has built a collection of art produced since 1952 without intending that the artworks, documents and histories it contains would ever constitute a unified, geographic, linear or identitarian narrative. As is intrinsic to contemporary art collections, this sampling of the living, controversial culture of our times implies groupings and lineages as well as solitary, dissident adventures. It would betray this heterogeneity to present our collection as a simplified whole. Nevertheless, the growth and maturation of our archives suggests that it is no longer convenient to conceal their complexity behind general thematic presentations.
Genealogies and Dissidences represents a new phase in which the museum’s collections occupy a dedicated section of the building through the simultaneous exhibition of a variety of cores, which will be periodically renewed. These cores can be historical explorations, the presentation of a large-scale installation or essayistic groupings. We hope that this multiple, discontinuous presentation does justice to the way in which we increasingly appreciate art and culture, precisely because it allows us a multitude of bursts of matter and meaning.
Exhibition Information
We have presented this information on the exhibition in an interactive format so it can accompany you before, during and after your visit. You may also consult it directly in the galleries.
Exhibition Information
