Tex-Mex and the city

BY ERASMO GUERRA

Everyone’s invited. Or at least they should be. That’s what Franco Mondini-Ruiz feels about the exclusionary world of art.

So when a group of school kids on a field trip happened to pass through his current show, “Feast without Famine,” at the Frederieke Taylor Gallery one recent afternoon, the 46-year-old artist, known for his high-camp “chucheria,” or Mexican-informed knick-knacks, looked up from his work table, gauging the kids’ interest as they pointed to a bust of Jesus Christ centered over a pepperoni pizza titled “Eternal Heartburn of Jesus,” the Warholian Brillo and Campbell soup piñatas that hung from above, and the rows of cupcakes that seemed to have been laid out to cool. With a closer, harder look, the kids noticed the male figures stuck in the butter-cream frosting, and the glass eyes that looked back.

These cupcakes aren’t for eating. And the piñatas — “The Jeff Koons silver bunny piñatas sell very well,” said Mondini-Ruiz — aren’t for breaking. What interests Mondini-Ruiz more is busting borders because while making art may be fun, getting it shown — not so much.

“I remember growing up in San Antonio and there would be a Latino show or a Hispanic show and there’d only be white artists,” he said. “You would go to a show called ‘Hispanic Images of Texas’ and it’d be all white artists. This was about 25 years ago.”

These days, as a kind of tongue-in-cheek payback, Mondini-Ruiz re-appropriates the images and symbols of famous white artists. Not that he’s not bitter. In fact, he said, “Culture belongs to everybody.” He only wishes everyone else could see it his way and expand their limited academic tastes of what constitutes art.

He’s hopeless about the lack of institutional support, at least in his native San Antonio, for local artists. “It was so tiring to be in San Antonio in the ’80s,” he said. “We wanted to have shows of Mexican Americans and people said, ‘Oh, we’ve had many Hispanic shows.’”

But they all turned out to be Europeans living in Mexico. “And I’d say, ‘No, we need to show the people that live here that are making art.’”

He pointed, as an example, to the recent opening of the Smithsonian Museum in the Aladema, where one of his sculptures, “Que Purdy,” a Venus de Milo on a stack of tortillas, stands at the entrance. (“My name’s never been put on it,” he said. “They never got around to it.”) He also created the gift shop’s “botanica” installation, praised by a New York Times cultural critic.

But as for the rest of the museum, Mondini-Ruiz said, “It’s one of the worst things done to our culture since the Battle of the Alamo.” He recalled that at last year’s opening, some of the items on display were Laura Bush’s purse, a Lady Bird Johnson pin, and “the space suit of a gringo astronaut.”

All the locals cheered, “We got a Smithsonian! We got a Smithsonian!” said Mondini-Ruiz. But for him it’s nothing special

“There are 250 other museums that have Smithsonian affiliation” he explained. “You have to pay $2000 and that’s it. It’s like having a Dairy Queen franchise or something.”

More recently, Mondini-Ruiz said he quarreled with an administrator at the San Antonio Museum of Art over who could be considered a contemporary artist, which left him emotionally drained and ready to move on. “I said, ‘Goodbye, San Antonio, I’m done, I’m done.’”

Mondini-Ruiz tells everyone that while San Antonio is the love of his life, “It’s also a thorn in my heart.”

Which is why he’s back in New York, where he lived from 2001 to 2005. For now, he said he’ll keep his house and studio in San Antonio, but he felt good about returning to New York, which he credits for allowing him to continue developing as an artist and an individual, including the chance to learn more Spanish. Back in Texas he wasn’t allowed to speak it.

“Even if you tried, your mother would get embarrassed,” he said. “Or my grandparents wouldn’t let me. Or waiters wouldn’t want to speak to me in Spanish. They were ashamed. Or we were ashamed. They were ashamed at my bad Spanish. I go back home now and people are like, ‘You speak Spanish? When did that happen?’ And I say, ‘I think I learned it in Chinatown — I dunno.’”

“I need to be in New York,” he said, having settled into a sublet above the Rawhide bar in Chelsea. “My bedroom vibrates till four a.m. to Blondie and Donna Summer.”

As a corporate lawyer in the early s’80s, Mondini-Ruiz admitted, he wasn’t doing what he loved. “I was a highly-paid scribe that negotiated building leases and real estate transactions.”

He was well-paid, but, he said, “I wanted to live. I wanted an extraordinary life — badly.”

He sold everything he owned and slept on the couches of people who used to sleep on his couches. And he traveled.

“I had $50,000 left and I spent it all on cocktails in Mexico City,” he said. “I bought Mexico City a drink.”

He eventually made his way back to San Antonio and opened what he calls, “a botanica junk store.” As part of his participation in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, he recreated the botanica and sold knick-knacks out front.

He moved to New York in 2001 and lived at the Old Times Square Hotel. In 2004, he won the Prix de Rome, and he lived and worked at the American Academy in Rome.

“And what did I do?” said Mondini-Ruiz. “I fell in love with a straight white guy who made my life miserable.”

He became an admitted stalker who refused to leave the building where they both lived.

“I think it was a good thing though because it kept me off the streets. If I hadn’t been obsessed with this person I probably would’ve been a partier.”

He also became obsessed with his work, painting to the tragic arias of Maria Callas. He finished 500 paintings that he sold later in New York. It’s how he was able to buy his grandmother’s house in San Antonio that became his home and studio.

Mondini-Ruiz described his current show as a “visual feast” where everyone gets fed — artistically speaking. “No one goes away hungry,” reads the press release.

“If there’s a kid who wants to buy something for five dollars,” explained Mondini-Ruiz, the kid will be able to find it. A blinking, plastic ice-cube, for instance, titled “The Marfa Lights,” a direct reference to the mysterious otherworldly lights in Marfa, Texas, sells for five.

While a gallery owner may argue that a piece like this may look cheap, a little too “gift shop,” Mondini-Ruiz insists on creating work from what he calls the School of the Ready-Made, creating affordable artwork for everybody. He considers this inclusiveness a Latino-way of creating and sharing art. He compares it to Tex-Mex culture.

“There’s always room for one more person to spend the night,” he said. “There’s always room for one more person to eat.”

Throughout the run of the exhibit, Mondini-Ruiz has held a number of what he calls performances and salons, including a “fiesta” with a guacamole reception.

“We spent five hundred dollars on avocados,” he said, proud to be a part of a moment in the city where the cultural caché of all things Mexican continues to rise and where, he added, “people are willing to literally put their money where their mouth is.”

And while gallery-goers won’t be able to taste the cupcakes and other foods in this art buffet, Mondini-Ruiz promised that for his next event at Frederieke Taylor, “Salon San Antonio,” on Friday, April 18, he will serve authentic tamales.