"Revealing Personal Identity: The
Indigenous Vision of Manuel Carrillo" is about photography and
identity. Melissa Carrillo, who is an artist herself, and guest
curator of the exhibit, wanted to bring Carrillo’s own identity
quest to life through the interpretation of his photographs as
text. While developing the exhibition we concluded that a new
ethnographic approach was needed in order to show how the
Indigenous is constructed through photography. But it had to have
the personal feeling, the "sentimiento" we very much wanted to
explore and transmit. Terms such as displacement, border,
location, explored in this project, come alive as a combination of
images and poetry, not solely an academic
discourse.
The challenge of museum exhibitions, virtual
or otherwise, is to provoke new thinking, inform, and tell a
story. We hope that this exhibition makes you think about Mexico
as portrayed through Carrillo’s lens, about the indigenous
Mexican, and about identity as a social construct.
This exhibition project is a collaboration
between the Special
Collections Department of the University of Texas at El Paso
Library and the Smithsonian Center for Latino
Initiatives.
| Acknowledgements |
Many thanks to the following
Smithsonian staff for their continuous support and
advise, their patience, and their unconditional good
humor:
|
Kathryn Cornelius, Rafael
Peña, Mignon Erixon-Stanford, and Farleigh Earhart.
|
Our special gratitude
to Melissa Carrillo for her absolute commitment
to this project and hard work, to Tam Muro for
his thorough and insightful advise, and to Michael
J. Tuttle, web master in the Smithsonian Webmasters
Office.
Copyright©2003 Smithsonian Institution
|
