Zacatlan: Mosaic Murals

Golden Project Award

Photography Lecture and Golden Project Award

Frank Bette Center for the Arts

Alameda, CA.

February 14, 2015

George Olney

The artists’ images will be used in the 2017 Underground Gold Miners Museum calendar.

Photography Lecture and Golden Project Award

Frank Bette Gallery

George with young photographer

Members and guests filled the Frank Bette lecture hall to hear George Olney discuss Street Shooter: Tricks of the Trade.

George provided tips on the challenges of shooting outdoor, street scenes and how to avoid technical flaws.  George suggested, “Interact with the subjects and get up close. You can’t change the lighting,” but by engaging the people George can often move the subject into a photo perfect picture.

George at Bette Gallery

George at the Lecture

George presented a slide show, often photos with flaws to demonstrate the challenges, and suggested ways to meet those challenges.  He outlined, “What editors and picture buyers look for” and spoke about content and how the photographer must think of visual techniques, which will attract an editor’s eye when looking at thousands of images.

At the conclusion of George’s short course on street photography, Margaret Fago, Vice President of Frank Better Center for the Arts, announced the winners the Golden Project Award, which is to fund two plein air artists, a photographer and painter, to visit Alleghany, CA. in the heart of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and Gold Country and capture images of this small, historic mining town during four seasons.

Margaret presented Chris Adamson, photographer with the first award and announced that Mark Monsarrat earned the plein air painter award.  Alternates Sara Kahn, Susie Long, Charles Lucke and Andrea Pook were honored.  Margaret said, “There were 21 contestants,” and the high quality of the submitted work made it very difficult for the judges.

Welcome to the Dick Davis's Projects

    

Dick atop newest mosaic

Dick is a successful, somewhat-retired stock broker who has lived and taught in Mexico and traveled there extensively.

     As Mexico emerges as an industrialized and oil based economy, many of the old ways will disappear.  In a search for a "better" life, indigenous cultures are losing their young people to jobs in the big cities.   With a concern that the old ways of these cultures will disppear forever, Dick was inspire to preserve some of the ancient culture so that generations to come will know their heritage. 

Dick at the Loom

     Over the last few years, Dick has sponsored reporters and photographers to record the many traditional local Mexican events such as the annual Flower Festivals, Apple Festivals, and Adobe Makeover Projects.  He arranges for knowledgeable local guides to point these chroniclers of history to the heart of each ceremony.  What they have come back with is in many of the pages on this site.  The photos and the stories will live on long after some of these tradiions will sadly no longer be practiced.

     We hope you enjoy your visit to this site.  And as a shameless, plug, Dick's new book:

    Bus Journey Across Mexico is available at Amazon.com.  It traces a frugal yet in depth tour through Mexico on a journey by bus.

An Evening at Mama's Art Café

 

Click here to visit Mamá Art Café website 

A Visit to Frank Bette Center for the Arts

Frank Bette Center for the Arts in Alameda. CA

Nena Reid, Miguel Guererro, Dick Davis

The Frank Bette Center is recognizable as a lovely yellow Victorian building in the center of Alameda. It was bequeathed to the community by Bette, a local artist and craftsman, as a place for “meetings, readings, showings and other creative doings.” Our mission is to fulfill and build upon Frank’s dream of providing a place to nurture creativity in fine arts, crafts, literary, and musical arts. The Center responds to those wishes in a number of ways.

From November 8 through December 22, 2013 the Frank Bette Center for the Arts in

Golden Gate Bridge Loom

Alameda, California hosted an unusual exhibit of oil paintings.  The paintings themselves were not unusual it was how they happened to be at the Center that is odd.  The artist, is a young Nahuatl man.  He is part of on of the indigenous groups living in the mountains of Mexico.  It's an old story, as opportunities in Mexico have improved the native peoples have been leaving their traditional homes seeking a better life by integrating into the greater Mexican population. 

Their heritage is becoming a casualty of this exodus. Dick Davis has a great love

Displays of Miguel Diaz Guerrero's Oils

for Mexico and its people and has traveled through many small pueblos.  He saw a valuable culture that was worth preserving.  In Popotohuilco he met artist Miguel Díaz Guerrero. He was so impressed with narrative paintings that Miguel was working on.  He was recording the people and events in his village.  He was painting what he new and as such was making a permanent record of the Nahuatl culture before it changed irrevocably.

Miguel's paintings have been exhibited in

Indigenous scene from mountains of Sierra Norte

various venues in the United States.  Sponsored by Dick Davis Fund donations to the Wilmette Arts Guild, Miguel has visited this country numerous times.  In his more recent paintings you will see the influence his exposure to our culture has made on his art. his art. 

Click to visit the Frank Bette Center for the Arts Website 

Extreme Makeover, Mexican Style

Article and photos by Efren Ulloa

PART ONE

Villagers meet before the roof raising

Sitting at a scenic and breathtaking 9842 ft. among the majestic and towering Sierra Norte Mountains of Mexico lies the tiny but proud indigenous village of Cuacuila.  It is home to roughly 1700 inhabitants. It is one of several indigenous communities sprinkled throughout the Sierra Norte, where Spanish, the national language, and the indigenous tongue Nahuatl are spoken. Incredibly, Cuacuila is one of 58 municipalities that belong to the city Zacatlan De Las Manzanas, about 150 km east of Mexico City. Even though each one

This house must be replaced

of these communities partakes in its own proud customs and traditions, Cuacuila finds itself as the leader of a movement that promises, in time, to benefit and improve many of these communities. Only a few days removed from the urban jungle that is the Chicagoland area, I was overwhelmed by the ubiquity and endlessness of the mountains, whose perpetuity and grandeur emanated tranquility and peace.About a 2-hr drive from Zacatlan, there is no form of public transportation that reaches Cuacuila. It is only accessible by renting or hiring a private car to trek the journey through the various winding and ascending mountain dirt roads. The town is indeed small, housing a small church, a mess hall, a small number of colonial style houses, a presidential palace, and a recently constructed room and board building for the various school children that come to Cuacuila from other communities. The one-floor but roomy building is equipped with numerous bunk beds for the kids who dorm there on weekdays and return

The stone foundation is laid

home to their respective, isolated villages and families on weekends.


Humble as it may seem, what makes Cuacuila a pioneering community amongst its peers is the impressive and respectable work it has done over the past year overseeing and authoring the construction of adobe houses for its people. Along with 16 other indigenous communities, Cuacuila formed an organization called CIUDEMAC (United Indigenous Communities in Defense of Our Corn and Our Culture) dedicated to building respectable and decent homes for its villagers. Although comprised of several communities, Cuacuila has quicklyestablished itself as the heart and soul of the organization.
The organization’s objective is to build using only local materials, such as earth, brick, and stone, abundant materials found in Cuacuila. The benefit of the project is that very little, none in some cases, of material is purchased or adversely affects the environment. 
CIUDEMAC’s reverential respect for the environment, evidenced by its use of natural resources and its globally conscious effort to produce homes in a minimally invasive manner to Mother Earth, is one of its more outstanding qualities. By exclusively using crude earth and local materials, the organization also believes that the villagers themselves become the authors of this MesoAmerican project.