A distraction

So, in order to distract myself from the big earthquake that just happened south of where I just was... and where my in-laws are... I'll tell you about my trip.

I'm tempted to break this up into multiple posts in order to make up for my week of not posting, but that's... quite annoying, so I think it will just be one.

Lovely weather in Mexico City. It was sooo nice to have sun and 80 degree days, even if most afternoons we would get thunderstorms, and I didn't have a pool to lounge by and relax at. Really, I felt like this "vacation" was a lot more hectic; I did a lot of running around and seeing stuff, and collecting things for my DP, which while incredibly extremely wonderful for my progress, did not leave me feeling extremely rested.

As I went down there, I had a meeting set for Monday the 12th with Dr. Marina Garone Gravier, a professor/researcher at UNAM, one of the largest universities in Mexico. I also had a meeting set up with Gabriel Martinez Maeve, creator of the Lagarto font, for 1:30 on the 13th.

I'm realizing now I should have taken better notes of what I did. My brain is running all of the days together, but I'm definitely still distracted, there's been two different aftershocks after that big earthquake. Looks like the family's all okay, but still worried. Eek.

The family's apartment is in the neighborhood of Coyoacán, which is an old neighborhood where Frida Kahlo grew up. Lots of old buildings, cobblestone streets, one-way roads that don't make sense. It's about half an hour to get to the Zócalo, or the downtown area of Mexico City. That is, if you take the bus or metro--traffic is a beast down there. #1 City for Worst Traffic in the World, according to some msn survey or another.

Downtown I visited the Palacio de Bellas Artes, which was built during the end of the Porfiriato, the dictatorship that brought about the Mexican Revolution. Porfirio Diaz was trying to modernize Mexico to be more like the Europe and USA, but at the cost of his people's welfare. You can see a lot of Art Deco influence (and I mean A LOT) in this building, built nearly entirely out of marble imported from Europe.

Palacio de Bellas Artes

Art Deco-y font, but wondering if it's original??

Cool lamps throughout the lobby area

A peek at the murals on the upper levels

An illegal photograph I took of Rivera's mural, one of his most famous!

We also stopped by the huge and very elaborate bank that I believe was also created around the same time:

The teller windows; the bank is still working as an actual bank 

Upstairs area

Elaborate stairs

Baroquey or Roccocoy

My meeting with Marina went fantastically. I was sick to my stomach I was so nervous to meet her, but she was really nice and super understanding and really had some fantastic things to give me direction for my project.

Her main concern was superficiality--that it shouldn't just be a façade of Mexican clichés and that it really had to mean something, and educate, which I couldn't agree more. So she had the idea that I should create a matrix of images, so that I might be able to form some sort of record of things repeated in the designs--how many words used, how big the images are, how the images are created, colors used, etc. I could then make my posters and have a reason behind why I made them that way; I could point to my matrix and say that I made the image take up 2/3 of the page because that was the way most of the designs were back then.

So that was absolutely fantastic, but it also means a LOT of work for me to do. She was so nice and helpful--she let us look at all the books in her office library, brought out a camera stand so I could take pictures, and then the next day she invited us to her house to take pictures of her personal library, which was just fantastic. She specializes in a lot older stuff--more like 1600-1850s, so a lot of the resources were older than I wanted, but she had the great point to make that if I learned the older stuff, then I would be able to see where the origins of stuff from "my" time period came from. It was very true, and I was able to see that almost immediately, in the use of borders and the text.

1600s

late 1700s/early 1800s

Her cat was very helpful in making sure to get in the way of the photos, and being paid attention to constantly.

Dr. Marina's personal library

My other advisor, Gabriel, had to cancel on me the next day, and rescheduled for 9:30pm the next day. I wasn't feeling entirely comfortable with that, but we ended up canceling anyway because his father passed away. :/ So hopefully I can talk to him through email before 11th week review, but he does seem to be very very very busy.

I also got a chance to visit the Frida Kahlo museum, which was about a twenty minute walk away from the apartment. It's in the house where she grew up, called the Blue House, very obviously because of its color. I was slightly disappointed with the museum itself--they didn't have a ton of Frida's large/famous works, and they had change the original placement of items in the rooms to be more staged; I was hoping it would be how they were originally.

Inside wall in courtyard 

One of her last paintings

Her staged artist desk with sketchbook

One of many large paper maché creatures/skeletons

The inner courtyard area

My last tourist stop was to the Templo Mayor, which is the excavation of an Aztec temple that was found right in the heart of Mexico City. They thought it was underneath the Cathedral, but tunneling for the metro in the 1960s found it only a block away. Tons of cool stuff has been found there, and I felt like a lot of the aztec patterns and things made sense to me as far as the designs I've seen that were influenced by them.

Snake heads

Giant snake guardian

Frogs!

The tunnel was built that destroyed a whole bunch o stuff.

View of the cathedral from the Templo Mayor.

Some color is still intact.

Skull temple anybody? Apparently made from real human skulls with plaster over them.

Stamps.

Isn't she so pretty with her earrings?

I'm not sure why they put little faces on them, but I thought it was hilarious. 

Actual colors used in the wall murals. 

You'll notice, if you follow the top line of the buildings, that they go something like this: /\/\/\/\ but less steep. That's because Mexico City is built on a lake, and is constantly sinking! Obviously quite unevenly. Even the Aztecs had to deal with this problem!