J. Paul Getty Museum
Getty Center
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles
310-440-7300
The Getty Center
Danza de la Cabrita/
The Goat’s Dance: Photographs
by Graciela Iturbide
December 18, 2007-
April 18, 2008

The expansive presentation of the work of Mexico City-based photographer Graciela Iturbide features more than 140 photographs drawn from the Museum’s holdings, the collection of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, and the artist’s own archives. Danza de la Cabrita/The Goat’s Dance will concentrate on the artist’s black-and-white work produced in Mexico, in Southern California, and on the U.S./Mexico border.

“Graciela Iturbide is one of the most important living artists in Mexico and we’re extremely pleased to present this significant exhibition of her work,” says Michael Brand, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Her photographs tell a visual story of Mexican culture, which we hope will engage our own community here in Los Angeles, as well as visitors from abroad.”

Graciela Iturbide (b. Mexico City, 1942) took up the medium of photography after her introduction to Manuel Alvarez Bravo at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinemagráficos Studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, where she was studying filmmaking in the late 1960s. Iturbide began making pictures on the streets of Mexico City and then quickly took up a more concentrated study of indigenous life and ritual, as had the artists and intellectuals of the Mexican Renaissance.

Since the 1970s, Iturbide has worked on projects portraying the traditional costume and festivals of various parts of the southern state of Oaxaca as well as the life and dangers of people living in the northern-most part of her country, La Frontera (the border). She has visited other parts of Latin America, and, through awards and commissions over the past 15 years, has traveled widely, photographing in India, Italy, Mozambique, and the United States. Iturbide lives and works in Coyoacán, Mexico.

Among the subjects in Danza de la Cabrita/The Goat’s Dance are the matriarchal society of Juchitán, Oaxaca; the annual Mixteca ritual of slaughtering the goats; her 1986 experience with members of two Los Angeles gangs (White Fence and Maravilla); pictures created on visits to Tijuana in the 1990s; and landscapes produced on travel in Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi in the late 1990s.

It was in Juchitán, where Iturbide created the celebrated, Juchitán of Women. Her decade-long project began in 1979 when she traveled there to study its inhabitants. This Zapotec Indian town has a distinct culture and way of life, notable for the dominance of women in commercial and political spheres.

The subject of mortality has also been central to her work. From x-ray images to natural history museum displays, the recently slaughtered corpse of a lamb, a gang member’s tattooed neck, or the dancing figures of the large independent women of Juchitán, many of Iturbide’s pictures focus on the body. Traveling through several realities, she presents hybrid creatures, ominous bird forms, skinned animals, severed limbs, the accumulation of bones, and images of death. In many ways, Iturbide works in an even more visceral style than some of her predecessors, like Bravo, Frida Kahlo, and Remedios Varo. Her photographs help to maintain the strong surrealist vein in Mexican art recognized by French poet André Breton in the 1930s.

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, born 1942) grew up comfortable, beautiful, and bound for a traditional marriage in Mexico City. The eldest of 13 children, she attended a Catholic convent school and, in 1962, married an architect. Within eight years she had three children. She was also enrolled in the Center for Film Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her involvement with the university and, in particular, one of the teachers there, helped her to cope with a personal tragedy. That teacher, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, a master of photography and cinematography, became her mentor. Initially, Iturbide photographed everyday life in Mexico City. But, like Álvarez Bravo, she was curious about the country’s culture outside the capital, especially the Indian aspects celebrated by the post revolutionary artists and intellectuals whose circle Álvarez Bravo had been part of in his youth. He encouraged her to visit pre-Hispanic communities and bring her own interpretation of the ancient customs surviving in modern Mexico.

Judy Keller, associate curator, in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, is the curator for the exhibition. Danza de la Cabrita/The Goat’s Dance: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide is sponsored by Banamex-Citi.