Guillermo Gómez-Peña | |
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| Born | (1955-09-23)September 23, 1955 (age 70) |
| Education | National Autonomous University of Mexico California Institute of the Arts |
| Notable work | Border Brujo Couple in The Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West |
| Spouse | Balitronica Gómez |
| Awards | John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship 1991Writer and Interdisciplinary Artist –MacArthur Fellows Program |
| Website | guillermogomezpena |
Guillermo Gómez-Peña is aMexican/Chicanoperformance artist, writer,activist, and educator. Gómez-Peña has created work in multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video,photography andinstallation art. His fifteen books include essays, experimentalpoetry, performance scripts, photographs and chronicles in both English, Spanish andSpanglish. He is a founding member of the pioneering art collective Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (1985-1992) and artistic director of the performance art troupe La Pocha Nostra.[1][2]
Gómez-Peña has contributed to cultural debates for over 30 years staging seminal performance art pieces includingBorder Brujo (1988-1989),Couple in The Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (withCoco Fusco, 1992–93),The Cruci-fiction Project (with Roberto Sifuentes, 1994),Temple of Confessions (1995),The Mexterminator Project (1997–99),The Living Museum of Fetishized Identities (1999-2002),The Mapa/Corpo series (2004-2013) and most recently the border operaWe Are All Aliens (2018–present).[3] His award-winning solo performances mix experimental aesthetics, activist politics, Spanglish humor and audience participation to create a "total experience" for the audience member/reader/viewer.[4]
Gomez-Pena received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1991 for his work as a writer and interdisciplinary artist.[5]
Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born inMexico City in 1955. He studiedLinguistics andLatin American Literature atNational Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) from 1974–1978.[6] He moved to the US in 1978 and studied atCalifornia Institute of the Arts, earning a B.F.A. in 1981 and an M.F.A. in 1983.[5]
From 1983 until 1990, Gómez-Peña lived in the San Diego/Tijuana border region. Most of his artistic and intellectual work concerns the interface between North and South (Mexico and the U.S.),border culture and the politics of the brown body. His original interdisciplinary arts projects and books explore borders, physical, cultural and symbolic, between his two countries and between the mainstream U.S. art world and the variousLatino cultures, including theU.S.-Mexico border itself,immigration, cross-cultural and hybrididentities, and the confrontation and misunderstandings between cultures,languages andraces.[5]
His artwork and literature also explore the politics of language, the side effects ofglobalization, "extreme culture," the culture of violence and new technologies from a Latino perspective.[5] He is a patron of the London-basedLive Art Development Agency and a Senior Fellow of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (NYU).[7]
Gómez-Peña is the artistic director of the international performance troupeLa Pocha Nostra.[8] La Pocha Nostra is a trans-disciplinary arts organization that provides a support network and forum for artists of various disciplines, generations and ethnic backgrounds. La Pocha is devoted to erasing the borders between art and politics, art practice and theory, artist and spectator. La Pocha Nostra has intensely focused on the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender and generations as an act of radical citizen diplomacy and as a means to create temporary communities of rebel artists. Every year, La Pocha conducts a summer and a winter performance art school in which the troupe's radical pedagogy (body-based methodology that has been developed during the last 20 years) is shared with international groups of rebel artists.[7]
Gómez-Peña's work with La Pocha Nostra has been presented across the US, Canada, Mexico, Latin America, Europe, Russia, Australia and South Africa. In recent years, the troupe has presented work atTate Modern (London), Arnolfini (Bristol), theGuggenheim Museum (New York), LACMA (Los Angeles), the House of World Cultures and the Volksbuhne (Berlin), MACBA (Barcelona), El Museo de la Ciudad (Mexico City) and the Encuentros Hemisféricos in Lima, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Buenos Aires and São Paulo. Gomez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra have participated in the following biennales: Havana, The Whitney, Sydney, Liverpool, Thessaloniki and Mercosur. The troupe's photo performances are now in the permanent collection of Daros Foundation (Zurich) and Galeria Artificios (Gran Canaria).[citation needed]
In 2018 the troupe performedThe Most (un)Documented Mexican Artist at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.[9] In 2019 the troupe performedEnchilada Western: A Living Museum of Fetishized Identities at The PASEO art festival in Taos, New Mexico.[10]
Gómez-Peña traveled internationally for two years with fellow artistCoco Fusco performingThe Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West[3] (1992–1994), a satirical performance piece in which the two artists were exhibited in a cage in museums and at arts festivals as "authentic" Amerindians from a previously undiscovered island off the Mexican coast.[11] The pair dressed up in a hodgepodge ofethnic drag and bits of Americana such as a baseball cap and grass skirt in the case of Fusco, face paint and a leopard-skin wrestling mask for Gómez-Peña. Coco Fusco described the piece as "a satirical commentary both on the Quincentenary celebrations and on the history of this practice of exhibiting human beings from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in Europe and the United States in zoos, theaters, and museums."[11] During its run, the critically acclaimed piece was performed at major museums and arts festivals in New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Chicago and Madrid, Spain, amongst others.
The Year of the White Bear was sometimes accompanied by a performance piece entitledNew World (B)Order, which Chicago Reader art critic Carmela Rago called "the denouement of the performance installation at theField Museum; using irony and humor Gomez-Pena and Fusco allowed us to contemplate the next step--being part of a world border culture, reclaiming our humanity and our hearts."[12] The artists also worked with filmmakerPaula Heredia to createThe Couple in the Cage: Guatianaui Odyssey, a documentary that records several performances forThe Year of the White Bear as well as viewer reactions to the work.[13]
Besides ongoing projects with La Pocha Nostra (Emma Tramposch, Saul Garcia Lopez, Micha Espinoza, Paloma Martinez-Cruz, Balitronica, and Roberto Gomez-Hernandez), Gómez-Peña has made collaboration an integral part of his artistic practice. He thinks of collaboration as a form of “radical citizenship”. Some of his notable collaborative projects include artworks created with:James Luna, Reverend Billy,Tania Bruguera,Annie Sprinkle,Richard Montoya(Culture Clash),René Yañez, Sara Shelton-Mann,VestAndPage, galindog, Post-Commodity and Non-Grata.[citation needed]
| Year | Video name | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2008 | Border Clasicos | An anthology of his video works, 1988-2008, Video Data Bank |
| 2008 | Homo Fronterizus | A collection of his collaborations with Mexican filmmaker Gustavo Vazquez, 2008, Onbound store, Live Art Development Agency, London |
| 2005 | Ethno-techno: Los video grafitis | A collaboration withDaniel Salazar,Gustavo Vazquez,Jethro Rothe-Kushel, and many other independent filmmakers, 1990–2005 |
