Wednesday, November 13, 2024, 7:00 pm
Old School: Video Art Against Nostalgia
An Evening of Films by Guillermo Gómez-Peña & Gustavo Vazquez
Presented in association with Gray Area
Admission: $0–25 (sliding scale)
Event tickets here
Guillermo Gómez-Peña & Gustavo Vazquez in person
As pioneers of the Border Arts Movement, performance artist/writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his lifetime friend filmmaker Gustavo Vazquez have collaborated in film and video projects since the mid-’80s. Curated by the artists, this retrospective spans over 30 years of work including a selection of their infamous “video grafitis” work, plus experimental films such as The Great Mojado Invasion (2001) and more recently SF Apocalypse (2022).
Gómez-Peña will present a performative introduction before the films and Vazquez will lead a Q&A following the screening.
Gómez-Peña and Vazquez combine Chicano wit and political vision to create an ironic, post-millennial and postmodern look at the future of US/Mexican relations. Both artist and director generate a complex commentary on history, society, pop culture, the politics of language and the repercussions of ethnic dominance. They attack hard reality with large doses of irony and black humor. (Video Data Bank)
Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and artistic director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978 and since 1995 his three homes have been San Francisco, Mexico City and the “road.” His performance work and 21 books have contributed to the debates on cultural, generational and gender diversity, border culture and North/South relations. His artwork has been presented at over one thousand venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, USA Artists Fellow and a Bessie, Guggenheim and American Book Award recipient, he is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU/MIT), the Performance Art Week Journal of the Venice Biennale, and emisférica, the publication of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (NYU). Gómez-Peña is currently a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency and a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.
Director/Producer: Independent filmmaker, Gustavo Vazquez is originally from Tijuana and now lives in San Francisco. Vazquez has directed over thirty productions, including documentaries, video installations and dramas. His award winning films, including Que Viva la Lucha, Los Guardianes del Maíz and The Great Mojado Invasion, have been shown at film festivals and art exhibitions including the Mill Valley Film Festival; Film Stock, Luton UK; Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia, Mexico; Centre for Contemporary Images, Saint-Gervais, Switzerland; L’immagine, Québec; Leggera, Palermo, Italy; and Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival and have been broadcasted nation-wide on PBS and Canal 22, Mexico’s National broadcasting system. Vazquez has been the recipient of The Rockefeller Media Fellowship and The Fleishhacker Foundation, Eureka Visual Artist Fellowship. He is a co-author of Documentary Filmmaking: A Contemporary Field Guide, 2nd edition published by Oxford University Press in October 2013 and 2017.