NEW YORK.- Reinvent yourself to survive. To celebrate its 120 years, the Hispanic Society Museum of New York It relies on contemporary artists to highlight its collection of works by the great Spanish masters such as Velázquez, El Greco, Goya and Sorolla.
He artist originally Cuban Enrique Martínez Celaya inaugurated this week this new chapter of this institution created by the philanthropist Archer Milton Huntington in 1904, who then had amassed the largest collection of Spanish art outside of Spain.
The Hispanic Society is dedicated to promoting Spanish, Latin American and Portuguese art.
Martnez Celaya’s connections with the museum, free to enter and located in the Hispanic neighborhood of Harlem, come from his childhood.
From his childhood marked by exile, the painter, born in 1964 and living in Los Angeles, keeps a first grade school notebook that he covered with a photo of a girl: “She was my friend and confidant because we were the same age,” he tells the AFP about the image taken from a magazine, and about the letters he wrote to his exiled father in Spain.
These experiences structure the exhibition The sea of words: Diego Velzquez/Enrique Martnez Celayawhich will remain open until July 7, the first of an annual series promoted by the director of the institution, the Frenchman Guillaume Kientz, to put it on the map of the city’s museum route.
That childhood friend of Martnez Celaya is none other than the Portrait of a girl by Diego Velázquez, one of the more than a thousand works in the museum’s collections, which today presides over its exhibition in front of his framed school notebook that he made when he was six years old.
It is the first time that this trained physicist has been able to see in person the image that marked his childhood. “I don’t even dare look at her,” he says, still excited.
Exile and loss
This exhibition is a journey to childhood marked by exile, imagination and loss, through the drawings from the school notebook and the childish handwriting of the letters to his father from that revolutionary Cuba lacking almost everything. In those letters he asked his parent to send him everything from chewing gum to socks. “I need stockings because I’m like a bandit,” he urged.
Variations of Velázquez’s anonymous girl, with some childhood dreams in her hands, such as the airplane that would make a family reunification a reality, the famous socks or a black balloon – “a fantasy in a country where there was not even television” -, structure the exhibition in the museum’s terracotta column room, on whose ceiling the artist’s first drawings and his first words are projected.
There are 7 large canvases on which drawings and extracts from children’s letters are printed, sometimes surrounded by the ocean, the main protagonist. He was a starting point but also an obstacle that prevented her from being with his father. Although when he achieved it in 1972, it symbolized: “the separation of my history, my country and a time that will never return,” he says.
Last month he returned to Cuba to inaugurate his first exhibition in his native country, at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana. And he took advantage of the trip to visit the school in the city of Nueva Paz, in the Cuban Caribbean, where he made the school notebook that survived thanks to a grandmother.
Students from his old school are the authors of the paper boat curtains that complete the exhibition.
“They are very proud,” he said, to see the result, he says of the children, the main fans of the exhibition who they have seen from a distance, he says.
“This exhibition has a very personal seed but in reality my objective (…) is to talk about collaboration with the six-year-old child who looks at the world with an idea of improving it, which is so common today with refugees and immigrants” , he concludes.
FUENTE: AFP
