Thursday, January 21, 2010

OLD NEWS BUT GOOD NEWS: Pueblo Nuevo in 2009

Happy Belated New Year folks!  2009 was a good year for Pueblo Nuevo Gallery.  We started with strong shows from Leo Docuyanan, Dignidad Rebelde, Amanda Perez, the Wixarika Research Center, and Asia Eng and finished up the year with an Art and Music Session, Renee Castro and a Pat Augsburger-curated group show.  In the summer, we held our first film series, with some fantabulous flicks from fresh folks (like that alliteration?), such as the Conscious Youth Media Crew's full-length feature A Choice of Weapons.  And the end of the year held some good things, despite being faced with the tragedy of death in PN family.

EXTRAEXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT
In response to the death of his father, Miguel Bounce Perez put together a number of memorial altars, starting with a small one at the Pueblo Memorial.  That expanded in an awesome piece for a Dia de los Muertos show in Oakland, and was then combined with a photography show at La Pena Cultural Center that remembered and celebrated the lowriders his father helped to build.  And that show, Hecho en Berkeley, landed him in the East Bay Express with a full page article: Their Car Was Their Art Show.  We're hoping that this show can be expanded and come to PN at some point in the future.

GET MONEY SON!
PN has really been missing Diana, who is on research leave to Mexico (where she is chilling in the real Pueblo Nuevo).



Nevertheless, we've had a little infusion of extra people power at PN, which helped us to apply for an Alternative Exposure grant through Southern Exposure, a San Francisco-based arts non-profit whose mission is to "nurture a broad range of innovative, risk-taking contemporary art in an accessible environment."  We thought PN was perfect for it, and guess what, we got it!  Now we'll be getting a little dough to help support this otherwise all-volunteer, all-love operation.  Of course, this doesn't mean we don't need your donations or your support when you come through!  Now that we're on the grantee list, we'll also be shouting them out, letting you know that our gigs are made possible partly through the generous support of Southern Exposure.  They also hold many art functions, often through their new space at 20th and Alabama in the Mission, so check them out.

THE QUILT
For those of you that came through to the opening or closing of the Day of the Thread show (flix of the opening here), or one of the many Sundays events we held, you've seen--and likely helped make--a beautiful collaborative quilt.  We'll post a photo as soon as we have one; it is not only a beautiful finished product but also represents hours of chilling out, listening to good music, having good conversation.  We had folks drinking green tea on cold Sunday afternoons listening to the best of Trane; we had folks at quilting too late with that firewater and Zapp; we had little kids putting their mark--and bringing a needle from underneath takes some real hand-eye coordination: we all missed and pricked ourselves a few times.  There's some fingertip blood and a bottlecap on the quilt; a Carmen Miranda look-alike with a sewn-on gold tooth; there's a meticulously embroidered mosquito (how did that man find the hours to do that?  It's like he lived in the gallery!).  Needless to say, the show and the collaborative experience is exactly what PN is all about.  Thanks Pat for bring this to us!

FOR THE TWENTYTEN
In the new year, we have all types of good stuff planned.  We hope to keep our Oldies and Art sessions going strong every Sunday from 3-6, so come through and look out for special event Sundays.  We've been thinking a long time about starting a reading group, and maybe this'll be the year.  We also seem to have come up on a projector somehow, so expect to see some movie showings at PN--and we might even have to have a Super Bowl Party, but we'll see about that.

As far as shows, we're going to keep you guessing--do we want to keep planned shows a surprise, or are we just so unorganized that we don't know what's next?  You'll never know...  But February is Memorias de ti, a mural/photo show brought to you by Pablo Serrano and Erin Yoshi.  The opening will be Saturday, February 6 at 7p.m., but we'll post about that in more detail sometime before the opening.