Early life, education and career
Mondini-Ruiz is of Mexican and Italian descent. His father, who was born in Bracciano, a town 19 miles northwest of Rome, met and married the artist's mother in Texas. [2] [3]
According to the artist, this dual heritage was rife with racial and class conflict, and it mirrored the European conquest of the Americas, with a "superior father from European lineage, and a mixed-race, inferior mother of mestizo lineage. I grew up in the shadow of the Conquest with him ..." His family lived in a trailer in Boerne, a Hill Country town north of San Antonio. They had "incredible" food, and some "very good art" painted by his father. Mondini-Ruiz's father, who spoke several languages, interacted with "sophisticated," well-educated and well-traveled clients who lived in Boerne, with his three TV stores serving as local "cultural salons." Mondini-Ruiz's upbringing was thus a mix of "high" and "low." The family rose in class status, and Mondini-Ruiz graduated from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, and subsequently from its law school. He remarks, "That’s where the boys of the good families went." [2]
Mondini-Ruiz led a closeted life until 1985. He subsequently joined a network of local gay Latino artists, most of whom were older than him. He met "the most amazing people in the world," and many of them died from AIDS. The epidemic made it "cool to be Mexican because of altars ... even white people were grasping to Mexican culture because it allowed a way of dealing with death and sorrow ... we’re the best in the world. No one can touch us when it comes to death and sorrow and loss." Mondini- Ruiz describes experiencing cultural, racial, and class contradictions, which "raised his consciousness," while, for a time, he was "Franco, the wild playboy lawyer that wants to be an artist." [2]
Mondini-Ruiz credits critic and curator Dave Hickey with discovering him. Mondini-Ruiz left the legal profession to become a full time artist in 1995. [2]
In 2001 he received a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. [4] In 2004 he was an Artist-in-Residence at the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, NC. [5] In 2005 he was received the Rome Prize and was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. In 2009 he was a Fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbertide, Italy. [6]
Notable works and projects
Infinito Botanica
One of Mondini-Ruiz's first major projects was Infinito Botánica, a traditional shop that was transformed into an art installation. Mexican botánicas are common in his hometown of San Antonio, Texas. In the mid-90s Mondini-Ruiz purchased a botánica on South Flores street in San Antonio that had been in operation since the 1930s. He used this space to create a hybrid installation/the store, which he considered "part of a social and figurative sculpture that mixed traditional botánica fare with his own sculpture and installations, as well as with the contemporary work of local cutting-edge and outsider artists, locally made craft, folk art, cultural artifacts and junk." Mondini-Ruiz has created different site-specific versions of this project at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (1999), the Whitney Biennial (2000), the Kemper Art Museum in St Louis (2001), [7] and the Fowler Museum at UCLA (2004-2005). [8]
At the Whitney installation in 2000, a wall text declared that "Infinito Botánica was a place that finally allowed a space." Mondini-Ruiz said this made him cry, because the original was a place for the queer and the disenfranchised, who had formally been denied a place at the table. [2]
High Pink
In 2005, Distributed Art Publishers published Mondini-Ruiz's book High Pink: Tex-Mex Fairy Tales. The book includes short stories set in South Texas and photographs of Mondini-Ruiz's artwork. [9]
Crystal City
Crystal City (2009, mixed media installation including glass, crystal, silver, plastic, and ceramic objects), in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, [10] is an ironic homage to the small town of Crystal City, where a struggle for equal rights sparked the Chicano civil rights movement in Texas. Disparate objects—crystal stemware, silverware, mirrors, and inexpensive tchotchkes—are laid out on a platform to suggest a cityscape seen from above. The work was included in the 2013 Smithsonian touring exhibit and book Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art. [11]
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
United States 