IN THE SPIRIT Y EN El ESPIRITU: WORKS BY MARIANA YAMPOLSKY 

En Foco, in partnership with Pregones and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, is proud to present In The Spirit Y En El Espíritu: Works by Mariana Yampolsky. This exhibition features a curated selection of portraits by renowned Mexican photographer Mariana Yampolsky (1925–2002). The exhibition is an initiative of the Nueva Luz Study Center (NLSC) and part of En Foco’s mission to preserve the culture and legacy of diasporic lens-based artists. The exhibition will be on view from October 24, 2024 – March 31, 2025, at Pregones/PRTT located at 575 Walton Ave, Bronx, New York 10451, and virtually at enfoco.org. Public programs will be announced. A companion exhibition featuring artists of Mexican decent is in development, and will open at Kreatehub Bronx in November 2024. Click here to RSVP for the opening reception.

The exhibition showcases Yampolsky’s captivating black-and-white photographs, which highlight the timeless landscapes and intimate stillness of rural Mexico. Taken primarily during the 1980s and early 1990s, these photographs explore the quiet beauty of Mexico’s small towns, drawing viewers into a reflective space where the silence becomes an open canvas for personal narratives.

Yampolsky, a foreign-born artist who adopted Mexico as her home, captured the country’s rural life through an extraordinary lens. Her work was deeply influenced by Mexican photographic pioneers such as Lola Álvarez Bravo and her peers, including Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Graciela Iturbide. With a focus on indigenous communities, her work speaks to the intersection of tradition, community, and identity. The photographs in In The Spirit Y En El Espíritu go beyond documentation. Yampolsky’s work balances hardship with moments of simplicity and reflection, offering a space to contemplate life’s layered human conditions. Through her lens, Yampolsky invites viewers to witness the potential for magic in the every day, presenting rural Mexican life in a way that echoes into the fast-paced modern world. Her work, suspended in time, becomes an incantation of life itself, where the contradictions between life, death, ritual, and celebration palpitate across the images.

Among the exhibited works are images from her 1993 collaboration with renowned journalist Elena Poniatowska, documenting the lives of indigenous Mazahua women. These portraits capture the emotional and economic struggles of women whose husbands left for Mexico City, often never to return, yet also depict their resilience and quiet strength. Building on the successful launch of the Nueva Luz Study Center, and Boricua Lens: Sophie Rivera Portraits, En Foco has organized this exhibition, as a way to expand the current information available for Mariana Yampolsky. This initiative aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of Yampolsky’s professional and creative journey. By enriching her entry in our archive, the exhibition offers a fuller picture of her artistic contributions and the depth of her work.

IN THE SPIRIT Y EN El ESPIRITU: WORKS BY MARIANA YAMPOLSKY PRESS RELEASE

Mariana Yampolsky, born on September 6, 1925, in Chicago, Illinois, earned a Bachelor of Arts in social sciences from the University of Chicago in 1944. After her father’s passing and her mother’s relocation to New York, Yampolsky was profoundly inspired by a campus presentation about the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop), a renowned collective of printmakers and artists dedicated to social causes. Motivated by this, she moved to Mexico in 1945 to join the group, becoming the only female member of the Taller. While studying at the prestigious art school La Esmeralda, she honed her artistic skills and immersed herself in Mexico’s vibrant cultural scene.
Yampolsky transitioned into photography in 1948, documenting Mexican murals, folk art, and the country’s rural life. Her body of work, which includes more than 66,000 photographs, captures the essence of Mexico’s landscape, culture, and people. A significant milestone in her career came in 1951 when she co-founded the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, an influential institution promoting Mexican art. She held her first solo photography exhibition in 1960.

Yampolsky became a Mexican citizen in 1958 and is celebrated for her contributions to both Mexican art and photography. She passed away on May 3, 2002, leaving behind a rich legacy of work that continues to resonate with audiences today.

Xavier Robles Armas is a multidisciplinary artist and curator with a focus on public space, photography, Mexican-American literature, and how migration shapes architecture in the U.S. He is currently the Events and Arts Manager at the Latinx Project, NYU, where he curated Tinkuy: Converging Ecologies (2023) and supported exhibitions like Re-collections (2024). A recent Leadership Institute Fellow at NALAC (2024), Xavier has also been part of the inaugural cohort of Latinx curators in the A&L Berg Foundation’s Early Stage Arts Professionals program. He has held fellowships at the Queens Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago, and worked with various institutions as a curator, educator, and programmer. Xavier is pursuing an MA in Performance Studies at NYU, holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in Architectural Studies from Hampshire College. Born in Zacatecas, Mexico, Xavier lives in Queens, New York—by way of Santa Ana, California.

Remembering Mariana
By Elizabeth Ferrer 

Thirty years ago I collaborated with En Foco on a mentor issue of Nueva Luz, one dedicated to the Mexican photographer Mariana Yampolsky (1925–2002). As a curator then engrossed in projects focusing on Mexican photography, I knew her work well. I had written about it for books and exhibition catalogues, and would later curate a large exhibition of her photographs and collection of Mexican folk art that was shown in New York and Washington, DC.[1] But above all, Mariana was my dear friend, and at times, something of a guardian angel to me. We met in the 1980s when I first began traveling to Mexico City, a Chicana based in New York intent on better understanding my cultural heritage and on curating exhibitions that would break new ground in the United States. I visited every contemporary art gallery I could find, and at one, I encountered the work of photographer Flor Garduño (b. 1957). Seeing how impressed I was with the exhibition, the gallerist, Benjamin Diaz, suggested that I should get to know Mariana Yampolsky, who had mentored Flor. He explained that Mariana was born in the United States but had been long established in Mexico. I was about to return to New York but I called her a few weeks later, telling her that Benjamin thought we should meet. She was incredibly warm, and after asking about my work, said she’d send me some materials to review (this was before the era of email and websites). She also invited me to stay with her the next time I came to Mexico City.

When Mariana’s package finally made its way to me, I was moved by the photographs I saw in her now-classic 1985 book, La Raíz y el Camino, exquisitely composed black-and-white images of rural, Indigenous people.[2] With a precise gaze and deep sensitivity, she conveyed the resilience of people with little material means but who were heirs to rich cultural and spiritual legacies. She also photographed Indigenous and vernacular architecture, crumbling haciendas, and the stark, arid landscapes she encountered in her travels. For me, her photographs functioned as much as documents as poetic statements of ways of life that would not likely survive another generation. Rather than evoking a moment in time, I observed in her images the sense of time stilled, as if her subjects existed nebulously between past and present. Eventually, she would turn her camera on the incursions of modernity, mass media, and crass commercialization in Mexico, even in isolated regions. But in her classic, best known work, she showed us individuals she wanted to memorialize, worlds she wanted to preserve through the photograph.  

I soon began to stay with Mariana and her husband Arjen van der Sluis in their home in Tlalpan on the southern edge of Mexico City. The home—a fusion of modernist design and traditional, hand-hewn materials—was designed by Mariana herself. I quickly discovered that  65 Calle San Marcos was a gathering place for artists, writers, and intellectuals; individuals hailing from Mexico and elsewhere who were united by their dedication to the study and preservation of Mexican art and culture. Moreover, the home was a veritable museum of folk art—Mariana purchased objects from their makers whenever she traveled in the countryside to photograph. I relished each visit, and my lengthy stays made possible many of the exhibitions and publications on modern and contemporary Mexican art that I produced in the 1990s and 2000s.

I also spent time with Mariana on my home turf. She traveled to the United States for exhibitions of her work, to give talks, and to meet with her gallerists (she had a small but steady market for her prints, largely in the United States). What impressed me was that wherever we were together, whether in New York, San Francisco, Austin, or Phoenix, she would be greeted by a close circle of friends. Mariana’s roots were in the United States, in Chicago, where she was born in 1925. She graduated from The University of Chicago in 1944 and arrived in Mexico City the following year, attracted to the central role artists were playing in promoting the progressive values of the nation’s post-revolutionary period. She would soon contribute to these efforts. During her first fifteen years in Mexico, she worked with the Taller de Gráfica Popular, an artists collective whose populist work advanced numerous social causes and opposed fascism and oppression.[3] Mariana became a Mexican citizen in 1958, took up photography in the 1960s, and never returned to the United States to live. She often spoke to me vehemently against American capitalism and its culture of consumerism, but in truth, she enjoyed her visits. During one stay in New York she was introduced to En Foco and its founding director, Charles Biasiny-Rivera. The organization’s mission and values aligned closely with those of Mariana, who devoted much time to mentoring and supporting young photographers and curators, including me. Mariana’s donation of thirty-seven prints to En Foco’s permanent collection amply acknowledged her appreciation for the organization, and made it home to one of the larger collections of prints by the photographer outside of Mexico.[4]

For much of her career, Mariana was best known for photographs that envisioned a kind of timeless Mexico, populated by those who lived close to the land, followed the rhythms of nature, and enacted rituals tied to faith and community. The lyrical quality of these images often overshadowed a deep political intent. Mariana’s art—whether her printmaking or photography—was rooted in an enduring commitment to common people and to social justice. Her aim, she once told me, was to depict moments in the lives of people that others didn’t see or didn’t want to see. When she captured a scene of maternal love, as in Caress, one of her most beloved photographs, she was also expressing the precarious nature of lives lived by Indigenous people, especially women who were often abandoned by husbands in search of work in distant cities.

Mariana’s focus shifted in the mid-1990s around the time that En Foco dedicated an issue of Nueva Luz to Mariana, in 1995 (4:4). She had begun to pursue a radically different body of work, one that remains little known but that predominated her late career. She had often spoken to me about the increasing number of satellite dishes she’d see in remote villages in Mexico, about the influence of pop culture and the media on young people, and about the abundance of plastic everywhere. As much as she loathed the impact of mass media and mass production in Mexico, she was fascinated by the visual evidence of change and began to photograph these new realities. She photographed street vendors selling caps emblazoned with the logos of American sports teams, the pervasive Coca-Cola logos and Disney characters depicted on the walls of bakeries and bodegas, and Halloween jack-o’-lanterns supplanting traditional Dia de los Muertos altars. She was an acute, often quick observer, who could capture a moment that perfectly encapsulated the clashes of tradition and contemporaneity that were common in Mexico as the new millennium approached. Mariana proposed that we would work together on a book and exhibition of these photographs, a project never realized with her passing in 2002.

Perhaps fittingly, it was Mariana that led me to En Foco. The essay I wrote about her work for Nueva Luz in 1995 began a relationship with the organization that continues to this day. Through En Foco, I came to know many Latinx photographers active in and around New York and was struck by how much good work was being produced, and how little it was recognized. Especially in those years, in the wake of the 1992 Columbus Quincentennial, exhibitions of Mexican art and photography were relatively common in New York, while opportunities for Latinx photographers to exhibit or publish were quite limited outside of the orbit of En Foco. I realized that it was high time for me to shift my attention closer to home, and over the last two decades, I’ve maintained a commitment to studying and exhibiting the work of Latinx artists and photographers. I have En Foco, and Mariana, to thank for that.

[1] The 2007 exhibition, Embracing Mexico: Mariana Yampolsky, Art and Life, was presented at the UBS Art Gallery, New York, New York, and at the Mexican Cultural Institute, Washington, DC.

[2] Mariana Yampolsky, La Raíz y el Camino, essay by Elena Poiniatowska (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985).

[3] For an overview of Mariana’s years as a printmaker, see Helga Prignitz-Poda, From Posada to Isotype, from Kollwitz to Catlett. Exchanges of Political Print Culture (Madrid: Museo Reina Sofia, 2023), pp 358-375. From Posada to Isotype, from Kollwitz to Catlett. Exchanges of Political Print Culture by Museo Reina Sofía – Issuu.

[4] The largest collection of prints by the artist in the US—over 250—is held by the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas. Her archive of over 70,000 negatives, photographic prints, documents, and bibliographic materials is held at the Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavigero of the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City.

Remembering Mariana
By Elizabeth Ferrer 

Thirty years ago I collaborated with En Foco on a mentor issue of Nueva Luz, one dedicated to the Mexican photographer Mariana Yampolsky (1925–2002). As a curator then engrossed in projects focusing on Mexican photography, I knew her work well. I had written about it for books and exhibition catalogues, and would later curate a large exhibition of her photographs and collection of Mexican folk art that was shown in New York and Washington, DC.[1] But above all, Mariana was my dear friend, and at times, something of a guardian angel to me. We met in the 1980s when I first began traveling to Mexico City, a Chicana based in New York intent on better understanding my cultural heritage and on curating exhibitions that would break new ground in the United States. I visited every contemporary art gallery I could find, and at one, I encountered the work of photographer Flor Garduño (b. 1957). Seeing how impressed I was with the exhibition, the gallerist, Benjamin Diaz, suggested that I should get to know Mariana Yampolsky, who had mentored Flor. He explained that Mariana was born in the United States but had been long established in Mexico. I was about to return to New York but I called her a few weeks later, telling her that Benjamin thought we should meet. She was incredibly warm, and after asking about my work, said she’d send me some materials to review (this was before the era of email and websites). She also invited me to stay with her the next time I came to Mexico City.

When Mariana’s package finally made its way to me, I was moved by the photographs I saw in her now-classic 1985 book, La Raíz y el Camino, exquisitely composed black-and-white images of rural, Indigenous people.[2] With a precise gaze and deep sensitivity, she conveyed the resilience of people with little material means but who were heirs to rich cultural and spiritual legacies. She also photographed Indigenous and vernacular architecture, crumbling haciendas, and the stark, arid landscapes she encountered in her travels. For me, her photographs functioned as much as documents as poetic statements of ways of life that would not likely survive another generation. Rather than evoking a moment in time, I observed in her images the sense of time stilled, as if her subjects existed nebulously between past and present. Eventually, she would turn her camera on the incursions of modernity, mass media, and crass commercialization in Mexico, even in isolated regions. But in her classic, best known work, she showed us individuals she wanted to memorialize, worlds she wanted to preserve through the photograph.  

I soon began to stay with Mariana and her husband Arjen van der Sluis in their home in Tlalpan on the southern edge of Mexico City. The home—a fusion of modernist design and traditional, hand-hewn materials—was designed by Mariana herself. I quickly discovered that  65 Calle San Marcos was a gathering place for artists, writers, and intellectuals; individuals hailing from Mexico and elsewhere who were united by their dedication to the study and preservation of Mexican art and culture. Moreover, the home was a veritable museum of folk art—Mariana purchased objects from their makers whenever she traveled in the countryside to photograph. I relished each visit, and my lengthy stays made possible many of the exhibitions and publications on modern and contemporary Mexican art that I produced in the 1990s and 2000s.

I also spent time with Mariana on my home turf. She traveled to the United States for exhibitions of her work, to give talks, and to meet with her gallerists (she had a small but steady market for her prints, largely in the United States). What impressed me was that wherever we were together, whether in New York, San Francisco, Austin, or Phoenix, she would be greeted by a close circle of friends. Mariana’s roots were in the United States, in Chicago, where she was born in 1925. She graduated from The University of Chicago in 1944 and arrived in Mexico City the following year, attracted to the central role artists were playing in promoting the progressive values of the nation’s post-revolutionary period. She would soon contribute to these efforts. During her first fifteen years in Mexico, she worked with the Taller de Gráfica Popular, an artists collective whose populist work advanced numerous social causes and opposed fascism and oppression.[3] Mariana became a Mexican citizen in 1958, took up photography in the 1960s, and never returned to the United States to live. She often spoke to me vehemently against American capitalism and its culture of consumerism, but in truth, she enjoyed her visits. During one stay in New York she was introduced to En Foco and its founding director, Charles Biasiny-Rivera. The organization’s mission and values aligned closely with those of Mariana, who devoted much time to mentoring and supporting young photographers and curators, including me. Mariana’s donation of thirty-seven prints to En Foco’s permanent collection amply acknowledged her appreciation for the organization, and made it home to one of the larger collections of prints by the photographer outside of Mexico.[4]

For much of her career, Mariana was best known for photographs that envisioned a kind of timeless Mexico, populated by those who lived close to the land, followed the rhythms of nature, and enacted rituals tied to faith and community. The lyrical quality of these images often overshadowed a deep political intent. Mariana’s art—whether her printmaking or photography—was rooted in an enduring commitment to common people and to social justice. Her aim, she once told me, was to depict moments in the lives of people that others didn’t see or didn’t want to see. When she captured a scene of maternal love, as in Caress, one of her most beloved photographs, she was also expressing the precarious nature of lives lived by Indigenous people, especially women who were often abandoned by husbands in search of work in distant cities.

Mariana’s focus shifted in the mid-1990s around the time that En Foco dedicated an issue of Nueva Luz to Mariana, in 1995 (4:4). She had begun to pursue a radically different body of work, one that remains little known but that predominated her late career. She had often spoken to me about the increasing number of satellite dishes she’d see in remote villages in Mexico, about the influence of pop culture and the media on young people, and about the abundance of plastic everywhere. As much as she loathed the impact of mass media and mass production in Mexico, she was fascinated by the visual evidence of change and began to photograph these new realities. She photographed street vendors selling caps emblazoned with the logos of American sports teams, the pervasive Coca-Cola logos and Disney characters depicted on the walls of bakeries and bodegas, and Halloween jack-o’-lanterns supplanting traditional Dia de los Muertos altars. She was an acute, often quick observer, who could capture a moment that perfectly encapsulated the clashes of tradition and contemporaneity that were common in Mexico as the new millennium approached. Mariana proposed that we would work together on a book and exhibition of these photographs, a project never realized with her passing in 2002.

Perhaps fittingly, it was Mariana that led me to En Foco. The essay I wrote about her work for Nueva Luz in 1995 began a relationship with the organization that continues to this day. Through En Foco, I came to know many Latinx photographers active in and around New York and was struck by how much good work was being produced, and how little it was recognized. Especially in those years, in the wake of the 1992 Columbus Quincentennial, exhibitions of Mexican art and photography were relatively common in New York, while opportunities for Latinx photographers to exhibit or publish were quite limited outside of the orbit of En Foco. I realized that it was high time for me to shift my attention closer to home, and over the last two decades, I’ve maintained a commitment to studying and exhibiting the work of Latinx artists and photographers. I have En Foco, and Mariana, to thank for that.

[1] The 2007 exhibition, Embracing Mexico: Mariana Yampolsky, Art and Life, was presented at the UBS Art Gallery, New York, New York, and at the Mexican Cultural Institute, Washington, DC.

[2] Mariana Yampolsky, La Raíz y el Camino, essay by Elena Poiniatowska (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985).

[3] For an overview of Mariana’s years as a printmaker, see Helga Prignitz-Poda, From Posada to Isotype, from Kollwitz to Catlett. Exchanges of Political Print Culture (Madrid: Museo Reina Sofia, 2023), pp 358-375. From Posada to Isotype, from Kollwitz to Catlett. Exchanges of Political Print Culture by Museo Reina Sofía – Issuu.

[4] The largest collection of prints by the artist in the US—over 250—is held by the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas. Her archive of over 70,000 negatives, photographic prints, documents, and bibliographic materials is held at the Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavigero of the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City.

In 1974, En Foco was incorporated as an artist collective by three Puerto Rican photographers to provide exhibition opportunities and resources not available through mainstream arts resources. As we approach the 50th Anniversary in 2024, En Foco’s legacy of achievement and the spirit of the artist collective assures its sustained commitment to service as represented in its programming and archives.

The history of En Foco is preserved through its extant archival material — works of fine art, exhibition ephemera, including posters, catalogs, press and flyers, and complete sets of Nueva Luz, extending back to its first issue in 1985 to the present. The earliest exhibitions were thematic and mounted in bodegas, movie theaters, and similar community venues. These are the types of activities and projects that are documented in En Foco’s archives from the mid-1970s to the present.

Through the Nueva Luz Study Center, this living collection serves researchers, students, teachers, and artists in new and innovative ways.

• Nueva Luz: all 76 issues are digitized and available online for free, containing over 2,000 images and contributions from artists, essayists, art critics, curators, and scholars.
  
  
• Programming the living archive: exhibitions such as Boriqua Lens: Sophie Rivera Portraits, panel discussions, and a commissioning fund expand access to community cultural histories.
  
  
• Ongoing work: cataloging, digitizing, and adding to the Past Perfect database continues for exhibition history, Critical Mass Newsletter, and the permanent collection.

Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (aka Pregones/PRTT) is a multigenerational performing ensemble, multidisciplinary arts presenter, and owner/steward of bilingual arts facilities in The Bronx and Manhattan. Our mission is to champion a Puerto Rican/Latinx cultural legacy of universal value through the creation and performance of original plays and musicals, exchange and partnership with other artists of merit, and engagement of diverse audiences.

For more information about Pregones/PRTT, please visit pregonesprtt.org.