Mario Ybarra, Jr., Take Me Out … No Man Is an Island, 2008, Mixed media, Installation view, Courtesy of the artist and Anna Helwing Gallery. |
A Ripping Tale of Two Stadiums and an Island 26 Miles across the Sea |
Mario Ybarra, Jr., Take Me Out … No Man Is an Island, 2008, Mixed media, Installation view, Courtesy of the artist and Anna Helwing Gallery.
Mario Ybarra, Jr., Take Me Out … No Man Is an Island, 2008, Mixed media, Installation view, Courtesy of the artist and Anna Helwing Gallery.
Mario Ybarra, Jr., Take Me Out … No Man Is an Island, 2008, Mixed media, Installation view, Courtesy of the artist and Anna Helwing Gallery. |
Art Institute of Chicago Mario Ybarra, Jr. (b. 1973) is a visual and performance artist, educator, and activist who combines street cultures with fine art in order to produce what he calls "contemporary art that is filtered through a Mexican American experience in Los Angeles." Ybarra's previous creations include a momentous mural at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London that juxtaposes the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, the Star Wars character Chewbacca, and the slogan "POR VIDA" (Brown and Proud, 2006) as well as a curated display of Scarface movie memorabilia for the 2008 Whitney Biennial, which pays homage to his friend Angel Montes, Jr. (The Scarface Museum, 2008). Mario Ybarra, Jr. — fresh from recent projects for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Tate Modern — premiere a new installation conceptualized and designed specifically for the Art Institute of Chicago. In Ybarra's first solo museum exhibition, Take Me Out … No Man Is an Island, he draws unexpected and provocative parallels between Chicago and the artist's hometown of Los Angeles. For the latest focus exhibition at the Art Institute, Ybarra conducts a comparative study of Los Angeles and Chicago based on the chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr., and his business ventures in both cities. Through extensive archival and anecdotal research, Ybarra traces the cultural idiosyncrasies and similarities of these two leading American cities. Take Me Out investigates Wrigley's involvement in Los Angeles, notably through South Central Los Angeles's lesser-known Wrigley Field — built in the 1920s as the original home of the Los Angeles Angels and torn down in 1966 — and Catalina Island, an island 26 miles off the coast of Los Angeles that Wrigley also owned. It was on Catalina that he held Chicago Cubs spring training and hosted weekend getaways and hunting expeditions for friends and acquaintances including Hollywood movie stars Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. Catalina is of particular interest to Ybarra because of its omission in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the document that allotted Mexican territory to the United States after the Mexican American War. This technicality motivated the militant Chicano group known as the Brown Berets to lead an unsuccessful but symbolic occupation of the island in 1972. Included in the Art Institute installation are: a wooden replica of the Los Angeles Wrigley Field based on paper models of the Chicago park and photographs of the no longer extant southern Californian field; a wooden sculpture of the SS Catalina — a cruise liner built in 1924 by Wrigley to carry passengers to the island — sinking into a sea of Wrigley's Winterfresh gum; and Brown Beret ephemera. Unifying the installation is an atmospheric soundtrack of five popular songs about islands, both real and metaphorical. In a boundary-crossing show of civic pride, a series of flags representing California, Chicago, Illinois, Los Angeles, Mexico, and the United States is mounted on a wall painted "Mexican Flag green." Finally, 60 original, unframed drawings inspired by decorative postcards of a bygone Catalina, black-and-white photographs of Wrigley and his stadiums, and the graphic style of Chicano Rights protest posters are pinned directly to a bright red wall at the back of the gallery. Though Chicago is the ostensible subject of Take Me Out, Ybarra inevitably returns to Los Angeles, the city that most significantly shapes his worldview. William Wrigley, Chicago, the two Wrigley Fields, Los Angeles, and Catalina all work together in Take Me Out to present a trenchant commentary on hidden histories of places and the people who occupy them. And, by exporting southern California history to Chicago around this central figure of Wrigley, Ybarra gives Chicagoans an opportunity to contemplate their surroundings in new and necessarily expansive ways. |
Mario Ybarra, Jr., Take Me Out … No Man Is an Island, 2008, Mixed media, Installation view, Courtesy of the artist and Anna Helwing Gallery. |
