The New Orleans Hispanic Heritage Foundation is pleased to collaborate with the Mexican Cultural Institute in New Orleans with the presentation of the exhibition Calladita te ves más bonita / Be pretty and shut up by Mexican artist Carmen Mariscal from March 21 to May 24, 2019. The exhibition was curated by Marcela Correa, MFA. The title of the exhibition Calladita te ves más bonita is inspired by the Mexican saying that means Be pretty and shut up it is used on girls and women to make them not talk about what is difficult or unaccepted by society, France has a similar saying: Soit-belle et tais-toi. The exhibition is composed of works on paper, photographs, sculpture and sound. The works on paper that will be exhibited are imprints of lips of women of different ages and origins. Woman were asked to wear her favorite lipstick and then make a mark on a piece of paper measuring 32 x 24 cm, I then stitched each of the lip marks, to “close” them. These sewn lips are reminders of how society has wanted to shut up women’s voices, women’s opinions and women’s feelings for centuries and across cultures. Five of these “lips” have been blown up, printed out on a larger scale and stitched together, these “big mouths shut” recall the viewer in an overwhelming way of what we cannot say. The exhibition includes a sculpture made out of 14 steel pieces in the shape of lips, measuring 20 x 10 cm each and engraved with testimonies told by the same women. The series of photographs Coiffes (Headdresess) are part of the exhibition as well. Twelve photographs measuring 60 x 45 cm and two measuring 90 x 60 cm. “In Coiffes, originally produced as part of a creative dialogue with two other women artists, Mariscal fashions a variety of headgear out of barbed wire, a material that, as she puts it, “represents for me the border between countries, between people, between the interior of the body and the exterior, between the myths we believe in and the reality we live”. She is photographed putting them on and taking them off, making evident again through her gestures, the pain and suffering these dichotomies produce and reproduce.” Karen Cordero

To see pictures of the opening reception click in here