Summertime for the Pueblo: Osvaldo Torres

 June 2010

Pueblo Nuevo and La Peña present,

REGISTRY OF COLORS & HOPE /
CATASTRO DE COLORES Y ESPERANZAS
The Artwork
OSVALDO TORRES
June 6 - Juy 4 2010
Pueblo Nuevo Gallery
1828 San Pablo Ave
Berkeley Ca

Opening Reception June 6th 7-11pm

Osvaldo Torres, a Chilean singer/songwriter was born in Antogasta, a city in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile. He founded the internationally known Andean music group, Illapu, with his cousins the Marquez brothers in 1969, but has been a solo artist since 1977.

Osvaldo belongs to a generation of artists who stayed in Chile after the military coup of 1973 and was a major force in the cultural resistance to the dictatorship, both as an artist and in his community outreach work for the folk and alternative music label, Alerce, and as a founder of Nuestro Canto, a cultural production organization which linked artists with grass roots groups working against the dictatorship. During the years of the dictatorship, he continued to perform in union halls, community centers, churches and schools, even when it resulted in his being harassed and blacklisted from commercial venues. One of his longer works of music and poetry, La Vigilia was written for the Association of Relatives of the Disappeared in 1977.

Since early childhood when he first remembers hearing the music and stories of the Aymara people of the mountains of northern Chile, Osvaldo has been drawn to their culture. While still in high school he borrowed his first quena and charango from a neighbor who used them only as decorations and taught himself to play the music of the Andes. He has lived and traveled in Aymara villages, isolated and often at the ends of roads which could only be reached on a mule or donkey. He is fluent speaker of Aymara and many of his compositions are written it. Of all the many national and international awards and recognition his work has received, Osvaldo is most proud to have been asked to be the Aymara cultural representative to the European Union by Aymarmarka, an indigenous rights organization representing the Chilean highland peoples.

Osvaldo has recorded many collections of his songs and stories, as a solo artist and with other Chilean and European artists. He wrote the words for el Grito de la Raza, a musical history of the indigenous peoples of Chile for Illapu in in 197-. This work which Illapu has continued to perform all over the world is among the five works Alerce selected for its set of the masterworks of Chilean folk music. He worked recently with Horacio Duran and the Italian group Trencito de los Andes, to create the CD Escarcha y Sol, Frost and Sun, a tribute to the life in the high mountain plateaus. His stories have also been published separately in France, where he now resides. He has also written the music for French movies and television productions. He has been touring recently with the French actor, Bernard Giraudeau.

Osvaldo's music today reflects both his search for his own roots in the Andes and the influences of the Latin American, Africa and European music he has lived with since moving to France in the late 1980's. He continues to create, as the Chilean magazine Solidaridad, wrote in 1983, " a wonderful voyage through natural landscapes where humans and animals speak the same language and myths seem so real that the struggle for freedom and his love for humanity are inextricably linked."

For, above all, Osvaldo Torres is a storyteller and in every one of his concerts there is a moment when, quietly, almost shyly, he catches the audience' s heart with the traditional beginning of an Aymara tale: "our legends tell us thatŠ." What follows is always magic.

Outside the Pueblo

This Friday Pueblo Nuevo family Miguel Perez is participating in,

THE RAW ART GALLERY EXHIBIT
Uptown Gallery
At the heart of the Oakland Art murmur
2272 Telegraph Ave
Oakland

Opening Reception Friday June 4th 6-9pm

THE RAW ART GALLERY EXHIBIT: 4,500 square feet at The Uptown- in conjunction with Oakland Art Murmur- will display a visual art experience like no other, curated by Carly Ivan Garcia.

 

 

 

And Finally

Pueblo Nuevo & Trust Your Struggle are honored to participates in Brett Cook's solo exhibit,

SUPERNATURAL
At The Guerrero Gallery
2700 19th St
San Francisco

Opening Reception Saturday June 5th 3-?pm

Guerrero Gallery is pleased to announce Supernatural, a new exhibition by Brett Cook. Cook documents individual and collaborative transformation to promote awareness and celebrate the interconnectedness of all things. His creative practice includes crafting artifacts and experiences that reflect varied influences from art, education, and esoteric traditions. Supernatural features new and evolving installations from Cook’s public practice, altar-like assemblages, and works on mirror created from his ongoing study of nonviolence.

On Saturday, June 5th from 3pm to 11pm, an opening celebration at Guerrero Gallery will be the container for a social collaboration with Eco Chef/Author/Food Justice Advocate Bryant Terry, Trust Your Struggle (TYS) Collective, artist/educator Evan Bissell, and magic through participatory fabrication of a new artwork of La Virgen De Guadalupe. On Saturday, June 26th at 2pm there will be a public dialogue with the artists.

Supernatural includes new works picturing Arundhati Roy, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Julia Butterfly Hill and Thich Nhat Hanh that were originally drawn and colored by hundreds of hands at collaborative events in California and New York City in 2002 and 2004. The artifacts of these events have since been embellished by Cook with a wide array of media, including documentary photographs, medicinal plants, LED lights, and reflective paper. The inclusion of diverse sensibilities and symbols – from poinsettia flowers and brooms to the five elements – invites viewers to explore the similarities underlying ostensibly disparate cultural expressions and celebrate the interconnectedness of all things in their process and product.

Cook’s work cohesively integrates the breadth and depth of his diverse – and at times disparate – experiences with art, education, science, and spirituality. Raised in a reverent Catholic family of public school educators, Cook was introduced to transcendental meditation at age six. He was influenced by aspects of graffiti art and community art while studying zoology, education, and fine art at the University of California, Berkeley. In the late 1990’s, Cook began studying yoga in New York City while showing extensively in galleries, museums and making scores of permissioned and non-permissioned public projects. Today, Cook continues his study of contemplative traditions nationally and internationally with acclaimed yoga teachers, natural healers, and through bi-annual retreats in the tradition of Zen Buddhist venerable Thich Nhat Hanh. His childhood curiosity with the nature of things manifested as a prodigious, award-winning obsession with the life sciences through high school, and evolved after college to 20 years of farming and using plants for healing.

Cook’s creative practice includes making dynamic art works based in portraiture that honor the best of humanity in all of us. In his collaborative practice, Cook employs mindful interpersonal dialogue, participatory pedagogy, and contemplative curricula to facilitate rituals and to build environments where other people make things – and “things” include objects, ideas, and new ways of being. Cook’s body of work spans the continuum between the extremes of “solitary” artist and community catalyst, both as one signature and with countless hands skillfully working to relieve suffering in the world.

Teaching and public speaking are extensions of his social collaborations that involve diverse communities in dialogue to generate experiences of reflection and insight. He has taught at all academic levels in a variety of subjects, and published in academic journals at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Columbia and Stanford Universities. In 2009, he published Who Am I In This Picture: Amherst College Portraits with Wendy Ewald and Amherst College Press.

He has received various prestigious awards, including the Lehman Brady Visiting Professorship at Duke University and UNC – Chapel Hill, the Richard C. Diebenkorn Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute, and residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME, the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, Art Omi, NY, and the Headlands Center for the Arts, CA.

Selected highlights of Cook’s community building, multi-disciplinary work include:
Face Up: Telling Stories of Community Life, Durham, NC; The Building Community Making History Collaborative Project with the Smithsonian/National Portrait Gallery and Duke Ellington School for the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Colors of Compassion Collaborative Project, Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, CA; (De)Segregation, Harvard School of Education, Cambridge, MA; and Re-Invented at the Alvarez Bravo Photographic Center, Oaxaca, Mexico.

Cook’s solo exhibitions include Revolution and Multifaceted at P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York; and Meditations at Zilkha Gallery/Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. Group exhibitions include Portraiture Now at the Smithsonian/National Portrait Gallery; Walls of Heritage Walls of Pride at the Smithsonian Anacosta Museum, Washington D.C.; Black President Exhibition New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY; Hip-Hop Nation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and Generation Z, P.S. 1/MoMA, Long Island City, NY.

He is represented in New York by PPOW Gallery.
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For those of you that have scrolled this far, I gotta link you to some more goodness from Chile (where our current artist, Osvaldo Torres, is from). Our namesake, Pueblo Nuevo is a Chilean record label that releases electronic music, and it's all available FREE.99 legit at their website--that's the kind of access that we like! Check out this video for DJ Fracaso's "el ardiente gran estallido," which might give you a seizure: