Rita Eder (Institute of Aesthetic Research, UNAM Mexico), “Connecting Cultures: Miguel Covarrubias and the Greater Pacific, from Bali to the Northwestern Coast of Canada”
October 23, 2014, 7pm
SFU Harbour Centre, Room HC1600
515 W Hastings St
Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957), artist, set designer, illustrator, anthropologist, archeologist, ethnographer, geographer and art historian born in Veracruz, Mexico, was a consummate traveller who felt comfortable in different environments. At the age of eighteen he left Mexico City for New York, and in a matter of months he was designing the covers of Vanity Fair. His cartoons had enormous success: they were ironic and relentless in their description of high-society life and its cult of celebrities. Since his arrival in New York, Covarrubias was eager to get acquainted with the Harlem Renaissance. He penetrated the world of blues and jazz and would sit in clubs and sketch singers, dancers, musicians, writers, poets, etc.
Together with his soon-to-be wife—the dancer and photographer Rosa Rolando—Covarrubias he then traveled to Mexico and Europe, and later crossed the Pacific to write a book on Bali, which would be published in the mid thirties. In 1938-1939–a few months before the official outbreak of the Second World War–Covarrubias was commissioned by the Committee of the World Fair in San Francisco, dedicated to the Pacific, to paint six huge maps of the Pacific Rim, describing housing, means of transportation, flora, fauna and the arts. The maps and the fair were highly successful, and this gave him the opportunity to acquire further knowledge on the region and develop his interest in a comparative approach, particularly toward the arts.
In 1954 Alfred Knopf published the first of two volumes on the art of the Americas by Covarrubias. This first volume, The Eagle, the Jaguar and the Serpent, concentrates on Alaska, Canada and the United States, and dedicates its first chapter to discussing the origins of the American Indians. Highly conscious of the many unfounded speculations as to the cultural origins of the Americas since the 16th century he developed a perspective of his own influenced by his knowledge and experience on the Pacific.
The lecture will focus on Covarrubias’s different experiments with connecting cultures in modern times, as well as his method and order as an anthropologist, based on material culture, visual vestiges and his analysis of style. By coincidence, this is an important year for new perspectives on Covarrubias. On September 27, 2014, the exhibition Miguel Covarrubias: Drawing a Cosmopolitan Line opened at the Georgia O’Keefe museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As one goes through the vast work of his extraordinary life and career, his talent for interdisciplinary work and his sensitivity towards aesthetics, it’s no wonder Covarrubias is such an object of interest in current times.