Weslaco Artist Takes his Work to the Streets

About two years after sculptor Rene Garza sued McAllen’s International Museum of Arts and Science for censorship, IMAS backed down, offering to settle the Weslaco artist’s claim. But Garza, 28, rejected the museum’s offer to let him sit on a committee that selects the work that hangs on museum walls, and instead chose to continue with his lawsuit and search for an alternative space where art will be safe from censorship.

First of all, IMAS has never admitted that they did anything wrong,” Garza said in a recent interview.
“There is no way for me to change that museum’s values, and even if I could, it’s not my responsibility”.
Rather than worm into a museum that Garza said is out of touch, the artist has decided to create his own museum, taking a strong linguistic jab at IMAS in the process.
His creation is a project called {i}menos or {hay}menos, a play on the Spanish meaning of IMAS’ name. In Spanish, the phrase hay mas - an intentional play on words by IMAS - means there’s more. Hay menos means there is less.
“It’s a museum without walls, formal attire or admission fees. We pop up wherever we can and even some places where we can not, para los que hacen mas con menos,” Garza said.
The lawsuit continues in Hidalgo County’s 93rd state District Court.

GOES AROUND & COMES AROUND
Garza’s attorney, Abner Burnett of the South Texas Civil Rights Project in San Juan, said that he thinks it will reach a jury trial before the end of the year.
Garza filed his lawsuit against IMAS in September 2004, after “Petrograd” was rejected from inclusion in an IMAS sculpture garden exhibit, even though an IMAS curator had asked Garza to submit a piece.
Garza said that he first submitted photos of “Petrograd” - a globe patched together from old gas signs and car parts. But when then director Lewis Savoie saw the piece – after museum laborers had already picked it up from Weslaco and hauled it to McAllen – he rejected it, Garza said.
Savoie first told the press that the piece was rejected for its political commentary, but later added that the piece was poorly made. IMAS board members backed Savoie on his decision. But a month later, after Savoie was arrested for solicitation of sex from a policeman posing as a male prostitute in a city park, the board was not so kind and soon terminated Savoie from his post.
Savoie could not be reached for comment. His previous phone number is out of order, and museum officials could not provide contact information by press time.
Garza said the fact that Savoie was fired after soliciting homosexual sex, and not after being accused of censorship, illustrates the off-kilter values of the museum that influenced his decision to reject the museum’s settlement offer.
IMAS officials did not respond to phone calls seeking comment by press time. Garza and his attorney, however, said that IMAS officials maintain that the problems the museum experienced under Savoie’s leadership are over.

SAY IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT
Garza’s work hinges on free speech. You can see it on telephone poles, old concrete slabs in city parks, and sometimes even in your favorite newspaper.
Once a week, Garza inserts 7 original stencils (he calls them “spaintings” because they are spray-painted) into local newspapers. To do this, he spray paints stenciled images on full-size newspaper sheets, then randomly inserts them into fresh papers that will be picked up
by unsuspecting readers.
On April 10, 2005, for example – the 86th anniversary of Emiliano Zapata’s death - Garza inserted spaintings of that icon of the Mexican Revolution, famous for his attempts to make the poor farmers and ranchers of Mexico the owners of the land they worked.
Those {i)menos spaintings as well as hundreds of other images transferred by mail, email, leaflet, and stencil, are part of the ongoing “collection” of the {i}menos museum. True to Garza’s democratic principles, {i}menos doesn’t own the collection, although several artists have contributed pieces to the project. The {i}menos museum exists wherever {i}menos artwork can be found. And anyone is invited to submit a piece.
As part of the {i}menos mission, Garza holds monthly art workshops at shotgun locations throughout the Valley. Last Saturday, for example, he held a spainting workshop at the home of Weslaco science teacher Laura Decanini, who offered {i}menos the use of her large, well-ventilated carport on the outskirts of Donna.
Most participants were there to learn how to make their own custom T-shirts, like 22 year-old Martin Martinez who cut a stencil of an eagle, like the eagles on the hoods of old Trans Ams. He painted it jet black on a
white cotton muscle shirt as a memory of the Trans Am he recently had to sell.
But others like 24 year-old Maggie Wright, a public school teacher, understand that Garza is trying to show as many people as he can how to inexpensively spread whatever messages they feel are important.
“What I love about this workshop is that it shows how feasible it is to create,” she said.
“(Spainting) is such a young medium. People can watch it progress, like rock and roll”.
Most likely the dozens who attend {i}menos workshops will not become part of a legion of South Texas-bred, democratic artists who infiltrate public spaces under cover of night to spaint criticism of local and world leaders. Or remind the public of human rights abuses in Central America. Or the deterioration of the ozone layer.
But Garza hopes they might.
“{i}menos is trying to open a space where people can be heard – a call to action to help people create their own environments,” he said.
For Garza, that call to action and the artistic process are one and the same.
You won’t find him on street corners yelling his beliefs through a bullhorn, or staging protests at political functions.
What you might find, though, at those same places, is his artwork, trailing behind events like an echo - maybe even like a conscience.
And what you will find are more and more {i}menos workshops, on both sides of the border.
His latest call to action for {i}menos is to locate the center of this US-Mexico region, using the outskirts of the cluster of habitation found in Northern Tamaulipas and Southern Texas as boundaries.
After preliminary discussions with geographers, Garza thinks that center will fall in an ejido in Reynosa.
The ejido, a communal land system that surrounded Mexico’s early villages, has played a distinct role in Mexican history. Emiliano Zapata’s battle cry was that “the land belongs to the people who work it.”
Garza hopes the ejido will play a role in his cause as well.
The official inauguration for {i}menos will take place on August 8 (Zapata’s birthday) from that geographic center which Garza is still trying to pinpoint. When he finds it, Garza said that {i}menos will have found its symbolic home.
The geographic location of a museum that exists everywhere that its art can reach, however, won’t be as easy to find.