The lives of many Mexicans are punctuated by performances; An ensemble of mariachi musicians celebrates a birth, performs at a First Communion, plays for crowds gathered at weddings and birthdays, and is engaged for funeral memorial rites. A traditional musical genre dating back hundreds of years to the rural communities of western Mexico, their tune sounds as proud and bold today as the musicians who travel from place to place to perform for their listeners. The actors’ outfits are just as exuberant as their ballads: their tight-fitting, decorated trousers, short jackets, embroidered belts, boots, wide bows and sombreros. Known as the charro suit, their attire has become a universally recognized symbol of national pride and Mexican identity.

mariachi, Eric Medel‘s first solo show with Rusha & Co. celebrates these artists and places them at the center of his work. The musicians, armed with their fiddles, guitarrónes, trumpets and guitars, appear ready for battle. Or as in the case of Mariachi on 1st St. (2022), could be marching home. Their uniforms resemble armor, gleaming and bold, as important as the men the charros wear. It is not for nothing that their designs go back to the liberators of the Mexican revolution. Some of the men, as in violin (2023) or En La Noche (Night) (2022) perform their solos in solitude, breaking away from their ensemble to shine for their moment. Other scenes, as in show time (2022), Pa La Photo (For a picture) (2023), or the largest piece in the exhibition, lists! (2023) show the band as a body. Medel’s depictions of its heroes emphasize its chosen protagonists as a kind of celebrity, iconic figures deserving of recognition and aspiring to fame.

Continuing his practice of documenting everyday life for Medel, his family and the community of Mexican-American people he is associated with, his new exhibition takes inspiration solely from these itinerant entertainers. Equal parts documentary filmmaker and synthesizer, Medel weaves the lived experiences of his community into stitched scenes with vivid colors, tactile textures and engineered surfaces. His textiles are based on observing the world around him, imbued with a sense of the photographic. Born in the city of Puebla, Mexico, Medel now lives and works in Boyle Heights, just blocks from the famous Mariachi Plaza de Los Ángeles. Located at the intersection of 1st Street and Boyle Avenue, Mariachi Plaza has for nearly a century been a meeting place for musicians willing to be hired to perform at restaurants, private parties or community events. Like Medel, these musicians are ambassadors of their culture, preserving and passing on the intangible heritage and traditions of the Mexican people to future generations.

Medel’s practice is a continuation and preservation of his family’s creative practices – his mother’s knitting and his father’s woodworking. Medel’s embroidery was first designed on his mother’s sewing machine. Wavering between sculpture, painting and crafts, Medel’s process of creating his denim canvases is painstakingly and meticulously detailed, evoking the immigrant labor that underpins life in increasingly globalized metropolises. His works on canvas are embroidered with lustrous and colorful threads, each stitch reminiscent of the extravagant outfits of mariachi ensembles. A charro suit with custom embroidery by legendary Boyle Heights supplier to the mariachis, La Casa Del Mariachi, hangs among the works on the gallery walls, sculptural and acting as a proxy for Medel’s own presence in the exhibition.

In his studio, Medel’s industrial sewing machine emits its own rhythm as his hands move his denim canvases back and forth as the machine perforates and threads the images. He becomes a musician in his own right, orchestrating his images in tempo, with each line of the string corresponding to the musical notation on the canvas. Medel’s approach is intuitive and – like a kind of improvisational instrumentation – spontaneous, each mark made clear and each colored thread chosen from a series of spools.

The scenes of everyday life depicted by Medel refer as much to the lineage of genre painting by Dutch masters, the French Realist paintings of Gustave Courbet or the works of Diego Velázquez from the 17th century as to the Chicano muralists such as Chaz Bojórquez or Carlos Almaraz, who changed the landscape of East Los Angeles on the walls of buildings throughout the neighborhood. Medel’s practice highlights these less recognized forms of fine art and glorifies his roots through his subject matter and choice of medium.

Erick Medel was born in Puebla, Mexico in 1992. He holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Recent exhibitions include strings of desire at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2023); Dirty realism: Otra noche en LA at Veta Galeria, Madrid (2023); With us at Ojiri Projects, London (2022, solo); Unseen Threads at Martha’s, Austin (2022); apple in the dark in Harkawik, New York (2022); a solo presentation at Zona Maco in Mexico City with Rusha and Co. (2021); Hustle De Sol A Sol at Martha’s, Austin (2021, solo); The human scales at the Rochester Art Center (2021); Breakfast in America at Rusha & Co. (2021); Still here at Martha’s, Austin (2020); And Every day, every day, every day, every day freedoms Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (2019).

The judges will select 2023 from the works of art submitted

Before you start reading, you might want to know this

If you are interested you can see examples of the works selected for the exhibition
Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize 2019 at The Kings Place – in an album on my Facebook page.

a wall in the Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize 2019 exhibition at King’s Place, King’s Cross, London

Who can enter?

All ages and abilities can participate. Persons under the age of 16 who wish to participate must have the consent of a parent or legal guardian.

Artists of all backgrounds, established and emerging, are invited to participate. Even if this is your first self-portrait or your first artistic creation, we welcome your contribution.

What can you enter?

You can use any size and medium. I’ve seen some huge works in past exhibitions!

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However, these are the details in the terms and conditions

• The artwork must be a self-portrait.

• All variants of the work – figurative or abstract, alone or in a group, from life or from memory – are accepted.

• The artwork must have been created in 2000 or later.
• There are no restrictions on the size of the work.

• Multi-part works, ie works in the form of a diptych or triptych etc. are eligible and will be considered as one work.

We welcome a variety of media including but not limited to; Painting, drawing, digital art, photography, sculpture, tapestries and ceramics.

Exhibitor at the Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize Exhibition 2019 (Feel free to give credits if anyone recognizes the work)

How to enter

You can enter more than once – but each entry requires a separate submission.

To enter you MUST:

• Upload a high-quality image of your self-portrait
• Provide all the details about the artwork

• Fill out the application form and agree to the terms and conditions. This must include as supporting information:

• Artistic statement – ​​200 words maximum – here you can tell the jury anything you think is relevant to the application and/or about you or your artwork.

• Resume (optional) – Whether you’re a full-time professional artist or pursuing a completely different career, the option to upload a resume allows the judges to learn more about the person behind the artwork

• Gallery representation (optional – will not be considered as part of the judging process – suggesting that the above two are!)

• personal data and contact information
• pay the entrance fee

This is £38.00 from a UK bank account and £48.00 if paying from abroad.2 The Ruth Borchard Collection and Self-Portrait Prize are funded by a charitable trust and the submission fee covers a small part of running costs The price.

View of the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize 2015 exhibition at the Piano Nobile

If selected, how your work will be exhibited

From the entries, 250 artists will be invited to participate in an exclusive online sales exhibition. Shared and promoted via

We live in a time when artists of color are wondering if their only route to legitimacy in the art world is to do the work that a predominantly white art world expects of them. Current anti-racist thinking claims so it is not the duty of the marginalized or otherwise disenfranchised people to do the emotional work of explaining their historical contexts and reasons for grievances to those who do not seek to understand them themselves. They ask: if I’m indigenous, can I only do work that deals with indigenousness?

Ho Chunk Artist tom jones puts it more simply: Regardless of whether the art looks “Indian” enough, “Native American art is still Native American … because it stems from Native American thinking and upbringing.” Jones has persistently made art about and for Native Americans for more than two decades Ho Chunk Nation. In the past year, the art world has started to take notice. With works currently on view in nationwide And national Recognized venues, the artist’s many musings on Aboriginal identity have emerged within the walls of PWIs and beg for recognition and reckoning.

While he claims his main audience is the Ho Chunk people, his latest work, Strong relentless spirits, has a mass appeal that extends beyond the Ho-Chunk Nation. Against a stark black background, Jones creates life-size portraits of Ho Chunk members, then painstakingly sews traditional Ho Chunk floral designs around his subjects, creating what he calls what he calls an “aura.” Beginning with a portrait of his mother JoAnn Jones to completing a portrait of Bella Falcon, a young ho-chunk woman of the Bear clan, Jones has increased the scope of his ambitions; The larger portraits take 120 hours or more to be pearls. Always in memory of the legacy of Edward Curtis and his portrait series The North American IndianJones finds ways to create images that speak to the individual as a collective, rather than individuals as a collective.

Many of Jones’ subjects wear traditional Native American clothing, although there are notable exceptions to T-shirts, khakis, suspenders, coveralls, and camouflage motifs. The sitters wear whatever they want at the session, something that Jones’ portraits have in common Charles Van Schaik, a 19th-century photographer who photographed the Ho-Chunk people not as cultural props but as paying customers to have their portraits portrayed for personal use. As with Van Schaik, ho-chunk people come to Jones’ studio with an idea of ​​how they want to be seen. In most portraits, the sitter looks directly at the viewer, forbidding the viewer to impose a cultural projection without the subject “seeing” it.

A popular way of interpreting portraits is that a portrait of someone else is also a self-portrait of the artist. If this is true of Jones, his portraits reveal a searching and generous nature, conscious and confident of who the sitters are but at the same time aware that they are being evaluated by the outside world. In an essay that Jones wrote for People of the Big Voice: Photographs of Ho Chunk Families by Charles Van Schaikhe addresses this double consciousness:

There is an unspoken complexity in the way a photo is read by people from different cultures and backgrounds. Each time a photograph is encountered, the viewer decodes the image with constructed notions of constructed knowledge. There are also the intentions of the photographer and the subject. What did the photographer choose to show us and what did the sitter choose to reveal? The interpretation we give to the image comes from our understanding of what the people in the photos experienced.

What do we know about what a ho chunk person experienced? What are we willing to share? Do we know that the tribe was forcibly evicted from their ancestral homelands in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and Minnesota? 13 times between 1832 and 1874? Or that they had to do so as a condition of the right to remain on their lands in 1874 renounce and give up Tribal rituals and relationships, and that outdoor footage of forbidden Aboriginal practices was used as evidence to arrest and evict people? This last historical fact is directly related to bans by tribal elders on photographing traditional and private ceremonies, although Jones related this Centre County Report that the ubiquity of cell phone cameras has changed tribal perceptions of this, particularly among younger members. Whether or not permission is given or accepted by Ho Chunk elders to photograph rites and ceremonies, it is clear that there is a huge gap between what we think we know and what we already do should know exists.

Jones sometimes takes on the task of educating the non-native viewer. He draws a line between the ongoing work he is doing for the Ho-Chunk and a more conceptual work that has a final point of closure, the latter speaking more generally about the Aboriginal experience. In these more speculative series, non-native viewers find themselves embedded in, often, attitudes of implication. In the series leftovers, Jones combines indigenous casino carpet patterns with glass engravings of historical – and often racist – depictions of indigenous people. Drawings and engravings appropriated from 19th-century publications are used in diptychs and triptychs dealing with issues of cultural genocide, forced religious conversion, white assimilation and, last but not least, the white fantasies of indigenous peoples.

Surprisingly, Jones says he worked on most of the work he’s done and for the Ho-Chunk out of tribal reverence, and it’s possible it will never be seen. When asked if he hoped to exhibit this work one day, he replied, “I don’t really care that the outside world sees it.” Much of this exists as future documents for Ho-Chunk members, as elements of a archives. Conversely in work like Strong relentless spirits, Jones sees his role as creating visibility for his people. “This visibility is important to me. I think of the little kids, the teenagers, and I think it’s so powerful to see yourself represented in art.”

Tom Jones is currently at it speak with light at the Denver Art Museum (100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver, Colorado) through May 22, curated by John Rohrbach and Will Wilson; Native America: In Translation at the Milwaukee Art Museum (700 North Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) through June 25, curated by Wendy Red Star; And water memories at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through April 2, curated by Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha).