The following is an exhibit I cannot wait to see! It opens in few days and I am heading up to two major long shows, the Tempe Festival of the Arts and the Indian Wells Art Festival, one after the other and right at the opening of:
“Sacred Gold: Pre-hispanic Art of Colombia” exhibit
Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, Saturday, March 31 - Sunday, July 01, 2012
This spring encounter the marvels of the world’s finest collection of Pre-hispanic gold, on loan from the renowned Museo del Oro of Bogotá, Colombia. National treasures and more than two hundred other exquisite gold figures and ornaments in this stunning exhibition give testament to the unparalleled mastery of gold, a sacred material considered a gift from the gods.
[“For more than 2,000 years the diverse cultures living deep within the highlands and along the coasts of Colombia perfected metalworking technologies still practiced today. Crafting gold into ornaments for adornment and for ritual offerings, they captured the astonishing detail, complexity and beauty inspired by the riches of the natural world around them. Sacred and symbolic animals, spirits and humans were represented singularly and in marvelous combinations with the purpose of visually communicating a sophisticated understanding of the universe and everything within it. The arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century brought attention to a “golden people” adorned from head to toe in gold ornaments and gold powder, thus fueling the myth of the lost city of gold – El Dorado, [and bringing an end to one of the most extraordinary epochs of American art.“]
It is interesting for me thinking of how a population can end, against another one that wants to expand. I see the spirit of conquer and the fascination of discovering new worlds, but forgetting giving respect to the native people is an act I hardly understand.
The integration of knowledge, the sharing of life styles and the discovery of far away populations is what I would bring back to my country, had I “conquered” it. But of course I live in Modern Times!
So, “Art Never Ends, It Transforms...”
Those populations were masters in the Arts of Craft, Style, Math, Physic and Engineering and, who knows, probably cooking too. That’s what we do too, in our times. We run numbers and build buildings, we create objects. We drive cars instead of walking and are definitely less slim than they were; we paint our hair instead of our bodies, although some of us like Tattoos!
This is Art, the same Art as those people’s… just transformed by the epoch we live in.
What’s your Art? What do you like?
