The Williamson Gallery of Scripps College has been awarded a $100,000 Getty Foundation grant to support the research and planning for the future exhibition project Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejon, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero, as part of the Getty Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.
In the last fifteen years, scholars have increasingly focused attention on the history of photography in Mexico, especially the ways photography has been used to construct notions of national identity. Yet the contribution of women photographers to this artistic history is only beginning to be appreciated. As participants in the second Getty initiative, entitled LA/LA, the Williamson Gallery of Scripps College, with the Getty Foundation’s support, will examine selected works of three Mexican women photographers of different generations—Sara Castrejon (1888-1962), Graciela Iturbide (b.1942), and Tatiana Parcero (b. 1967). Their careers span 100 years and their works create distinctive visions of identity from the national to the personal. The exhibition traces a transformation, from Castrejon’s work, which is that of the documentarian of revolution, to Iturbide, who blends this objectivity with poetic nuance, and arrives at Parcero, who alchemizes those elements into moments of individualized ritual. The exhibition will pursue these artistic, chronological, and feminine vantage points, which illuminate different images of identity from the societal to the personal, from the objective viewpoint to the inner, mystical vision.
Entitled Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejon, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero, the exhibition and book will present a selection of sixty photographs by these three women that reveals their individual approaches to the ideas of national history and personal identity, which traditionally have been defined by men. The exhibition and book will also examine the different place each photographer occupies in the spectrum between documentary and poetic expression.
The 2014 grant to the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery of Scripps College is one of 40 grants—totaling $5 million—that will launch an extraordinary series of concurrent exhibitions at museums throughout Southern California starting in fall 2017. Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an initiative of the Getty, supports research and planning for projects exploring Los Angeles’ vibrant artistic connections to Latin America.