Tag Archives: Photography

Get to the Art Museum!

We all talk about how blessed we are with the arts and culture scene here in Mazatlán. When is the last time you made it inside the art museum? Right now they have two incredible exhibitions running that are well worth your time!

The first is a photography exhibit that was over a year in the making, as it was Sichem Rizo Alvarez’s final project for his master’s in photography in Barcelona. You may have seen some of his imaginary Carnaval Queen photos that are reminiscent of Tammy Faye-Baker’s mascara-streaked, tearful face. The first time I saw one I thought, “cool, but a bit cliché.” Then I went to the exhibit! Sichem has combined his photographs with a narration that speaks to the power of Carnaval royalty, of our local “royal” dynasties in which great-grandma, grandma, mom and daughter have all been queens, the high highs of the week-long festivities followed by the letdown lows many royals can feel afterwards. He has set the exhibit up with lighting reminiscent of our iconic Mazatlán Carnaval lights. I black drape divides the space into before and after Carnaval. His mother stitched up the queen’s dress, which is displayed on a mannequin. Titled “Queen of Gold Tinsel,” (Reina de Oropel) the exhibit speaks to the ephemeral nature of beauty, youth and fame. You will find it in the gallery on the left as you enter the art museum downtown. Click on any photo to enlarge it or view a slideshow.

The second exhibit resides in the gallery to the left of the stairs. It may look like another photography show, but it is a retrospective of the oil paintings of a young man from El Habal, José Luis Tirado Lizárraga. His work is so incredibly realistic that I honestly kept doubting it was oil painted! He works with a dry brush, so it’s hard to see any paint on the paper or canvas, and much of the framed work on paper is under glass, making it look like a print. But the television will show video of how he sketches and then freehand paints with incredibly life-like detail. What an amazing talent!

As always, entry to our state-government-sponsored art museum is free of charge. The exhibits will be there all of March, so be sure to stop in. They are open 9-3 Tuesday through Saturday except on Wednesday they close at 1 pm. Address is Sixto Osuna and Venustiano Carranza downtown, tel. 669-981-5592.

Personal Invite to 2 Art Events

I hope you’ll join me for two events, both to be held a couple of blocks from one another in Centro Histórico on Friday, November 22nd.

Book ReadingThe first will be a reading from the book, Why We Left: An Anthology of American Women Expats. Edited by Janet Blaser—who will facilitate the event—the book is a terrific read for anyone thinking about life abroad or already living it. Local residents Susie Morgan, Nancy Seelye, Lisa Lankins and yours truly will be reading from our chapters.

Please join us at El Recreo, Constitución 209, from 3:00 – 5:00 pm on Friday Nov. 22, 2019 for the book event. The event requires registration, and will have a 50 peso or so fee to cover the venue rental.

Magic of Black and White

Then, have a nice dinner somewhere and join us again at 7:00 pm for the very first group art exhibit that I have curated! It will be a photo show entitled, The Magic of Black and White. If you click “Going” on the Facebook link, it will remind you so you don’t miss this terrific opening. Participating photographers include Alwin van der Heiden, Lucila Santiago, Marcopolo Amarillas, Christian Lizárraga, and yours truly.

The photo exhibit will open on Friday, Nov. 22, at 6:30 pm in Baupres Gallery, next to Casa Haas on Heriberto Frías, across from Hector’s. There will be wine and hors d’oeuvres. The show will continue every day through 21st December, 2019. I very much hope that I’ll see you and your friends there!

Please help me pass the word about both of these events. Be sure to put them in your calendar so you don’t miss out! They’ll both be a lot of fun, and you’ll be supporting and encouraging your creative neighbors and friends.

City Nature Challenge

43676323_731335040547404_6810896483013885952_oOutdoor enthusiasts, environmentalists and photographers delight in the wealth of flora and fauna to be found in Mazatlán. Now we have a terrific chance to let the world know about the incredible biodiversity of our urban area—we are much more than just sun and beach!

Francisco Farriols Sarabia, local naturalist guru, along with our Faculty of Marine Sciences have registered Mazatlán for the City Nature Challenge 2019, or Reto Mundial de la Naturaleza Urbana. The effort is officially supported by the Secretary of Tourism (SECTUR) and the National Commission on Biodiversity (CONABIO). The goal is to put us firmly on the international ecotourism map. I hope that you, your friends and family will join in as citizen ecologists! If you are a teacher, let’s get the students involved, too! There is a nice online education toolkit. Let’s do this! Let’s put Mazatlán on the map for good reason!

The challenge will take place April 26-29, 2019, and there will be several pre-event warm-ups or “BioBlitzes.” To participate you’ll need your cell phone or a camera and the iNaturalist app—you can install it on your phone and/or register and use via your desktop on a web browser. If you prefer to work in Spanish, the fully synched Mexican equivalent is Naturalista.mx.

City Nature Challenge is an initiative started in 2016 as a friendly competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco during Citizen Science Day. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the California Academy of Sciences wanted to highlight urban biodiversity in their cities, and asked residents and tourists alike to help them document it. The multi-day effort met with such success that, three years later, over 100 cities worldwide are registered to participate! Their website states that in 2016:

Over 20,000 observations were made by more than 1000 people in a one-week period, cataloging approximately 1600 species in each location, including new records for both areas. During the 2016 CNC, we heard so much excitement and interest from people in other cities that we decided we couldn’t keep to the fun just to ourselves. In 2017 the City Nature Challenge went national, and in 2018, the CNC became an international event!

I first learned about City Nature Challenge back on October 13th, when Paco (Francisco) held a meeting of local photographers up at Estero del Yugo, to help get the effort started. Since then Paco has decided to hold mini-challenges, to help more people become involved and ready for the big effort.

48380454_2035974423369486_863078217911631872_oThe second BioBlitz or mini-challenge will be held at the lighthouse beginning 8-11am on Saturday January 12th. Register with inaturalist.org and bring your cell phone or camera of your choice. Together we’ll have fun, get out, breathe some fresh air and get some exercise, and learn a bit more about our local flora and fauna. It’ll be a great way to get trained and prepared for the main challenge in April!

iNaturalist.org is a really cool platform where normal people like you and me can register photos we take of plants, animals, insects or marine life. We upload a photo we’ve taken, along with the place and the date on which we captured the pic. If you know what the plant or animal is, you label it. If not, somebody who does know will fill it in for you, and you can “accept” their ideas and recommendations, or choose which one is correct. In this way we all learn a bit, and scientists are able to track migration routes and the proliferation of different species. Paco himself has more than 35,000 identifications and 2200 species registered! Me? I have about ten…

I hope you’ll join me, both on the January 12th and in April for the main event! Please help me get the word out by sharing this and inviting your friends and family to join in! Together we can build more ecological awareness and care in our fair city.

Art Walk Golden Zone!

We love Art Walk/Camino de arte in our historic center, now there will be a new one in the Golden Zone! There are over two dozen artists in various media participating (painting, photography, sculpture, jewelry, drawing) and it looks to be a whole lot of fun! I will have Thru Di’s Eyes Photography at Athina Spa in the Golden Zone, and I hope to see you there!

The dates vary a bit due to Carnavál, etc., but Art Walk GZ will take place once a month on Wednesdays from 2 – 6 pm, so there will still be daylight and you can enjoy dinner afterward. Dates are: November 14, December 19, January 16, February 13, March 13 and April 10. Rumor has it there will be margaritas in the main office, Mazatlan4Rent.

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Below is a map of the participating locations, and there is also a Facebook page so that you can stay up to date, ask questions, or interact with the organizers and artists.

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Finally, below you will find a list of the participating artists and the event’s sponsors. Let’s join in and support our local art scene!

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Bless You All!

8C_Exposici_n_2_1-203732Many thanks to all of you, the opening of my photo exhibition in the Galería Peralta on Thursday night broke the record for most people attending. It also signaled the opening of the Temporada Primavera, or Cultura Mazatlán’s Spring Season; my exhibit was the first event, a very nice honor!

I was completely overwhelmed with emotion at the outpouring of love and enthusiasm from such a huge crowd. I found it pretty difficult to get a sentence out, I must admit. With nearly 400 people there—a beautiful mix of foreign and local residents—the room got hot and we ran out of both wine and ceviche, and they closed the doors at 8 pm instead of 9 due to the crowd, but I believe most everyone enjoyed themselves. I joked with Greg that had I remembered to ask Padre Juan Jorge to give us a blessing, we would not have run out of wine!

The exhibition runs through 12 April, so please if you get a chance stop by the Angela Peralta theater and visit it on the second floor. Be sure to leave me a story or memory in the guest book if you would! The show is based on José Alfredo Jimenez’ “Corrido de Mazatlán,” our iconic Mazatlecan anthem.

I so appreciate Licenciado Raúl Rico and his staff at Cultura Mazatlán. From the moment Raúl first invited me to do an exhibit right through to the opening, they were nothing but supportive and wonderful, doing their best to realize my vision for the show. Raúl’s words of introduction were very encouraging. He told those in attendance that he felt my photos express a unique view of Mazatlán, capturing the soul of the place and its people, but from a perspective quite different from the normal.

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Most of all I appreciate my beloved partner in life, Greg. I am so incredibly blessed to be married to someone so loving and supportive! He usually is with me when I take photos, and has saved me from many buses, a crocodile, and thieves. On opening night he made a marvelous palm tree to dress up the refreshments table.

I did a lot of media interviews pre-opening, including my first live TV interview in Spanish (yikes!), and there were loads of media present during the opening as well. I really like the article that Héctor Guardado did in the Noroeste newspaper, because they took photos of many of my subjects standing in front of their photos. Noroeste also interviewed those subjects, which I urged everyone attending the opening to do. Please check it out. I post some of the photos from Noroeste and Cultura below; click on any pic to enlarge or view a slideshow.

Katia Galindo Ávila de la Colonia San Antonio, con “Cuando es más grande el corazón que la necesidad”, her photo “When the Heart is Larger than Basic Necessities”
Gabriel Alfonso Gámez Zuñiga
Visitors to the gallery opening
Mari Rivera Dominguez (centro), Rincón de MZT, con su foto “La familia Ford” or “The Ford Family”
Heredero del tiempo/Heir of Time
Part of the large crowd that attended
Matinal momento pescando/Early Morning Fishing
Lic. Raúl Rico Gonzalez, Director of CULTURA Mazatlán, inaugurating the expo
Visitors to the gallery opening
Thank you gift
Visitors to the gallery opening
Visitors to the gallery opening
Visitors to the gallery opening
Visitors to the gallery opening
Las lumbres del ocaso / Shades of sunset
Festival de la Luz
Visitors to the gallery opening
I look so sad, right? 😉

Mario Martini over at Paralelo23 also wrote a very nice article. I sadly don’t have copies of the television interviews, but here is one from Cultura. Skip that opening thumbnail, please, lol!