Artist Explores Mexico Through Card Game
 Angela Cara Pancrazio - The Arizona Republic
Teresa Villegas misses the smell of her paints.
The Phoenix artist, who is the mother of a 1-year-old and who is five weeks from giving birth to twin sons, hasn't had a whiff for nearly two years.
"I love oils," said Villegas, 41. "I could eat them."
She's been able to remain close to her palette of vibrant purples, pinks, greens, blues and crimsons, through her traveling exhibit of 54 paintings that depict the culture and history of Mexico.
So though she can't pick up a brush, she can track her popular exhibit, "La Lotería: An Exploration of México," as it travels the nation. It has been booked by galleries and museums nationwide through 2008.
Villegas is the artist's married name. She grew up in Iowa, and it was there that she fell for Mexico.
Her grandfather, a theater professor at a private college in Davenport, Iowa, traveled to Mexico City as a playwright. He then would bring the culture back to the Midwest by writing plays and hiring actors from Mexico.
He taught her about Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo long before the Mexican artists were popularized by Hollywood movies.
She discovered lotería, or Mexican bingo, on her own.
More than 20 years ago, in her freshman year at the University of Arizona, she traveled to Mexico for the first time during spring break. She stumbled upon a fair in the tiny town of Nyarite.
Everyone was gathered around a circle of tables and chairs, hovering over tablas, or small boards that resembled bingo cards, only the squares were filled with pictures. The clutch of players surrounded a table piled high with toy prizes.
"The imagery captured me right away," Villegas said.
The game, widely popular in small Mexican towns, is similar to American bingo. Only in bingo, a number and letter are chosen from a birdcage-like drum and the game board has various numbers listed under the letters that spell out b-i-n-g-o.
In lotería, a colorful image is drawn from a deck of cards that matches those found on the board.
The game's images stuck with Villegas.
After college, several trips to Mexico and a brief career as a Tucson newspaper illustrator, Villegas decided to paint her own interpretation of Mexico, its history and the people, and to tell the story through the lotería.
Villegas used the most popular version of the game, the Don Clemente Gallo, as her template. It is more than 100 years old.
She came up with new images and painted them on 54 wood panels, the same number of cards in a lotería deck.
Each painting is either an icon of daily life in Mexico or a historical figure. One image is pan dulce or sweet bread; another is a bowl of pozole, or soup; then there's a pack of chicle, those little packs of gum that children love to hawk on Mexico's street corners.
Villegas retreated from her rich, bright palette to depict a lesser known but important player in the country's history, a nun named Juana Inés de la Cruz.
"I'd never heard of her, I kept seeing this nun on their money," Villegas said, always wondering, "Who is this, what is this about?"
She unraveled the incredible story of how Sor Juana, or "Sister Juana," came from Spain to Mexico in the mid-1600s and espoused pro-feminism beliefs such as the education of women. A radical notion, Villegas said, in a time when "you either got married or became a nun."
One of the few original lotería icons that Villegas kept was el corazon, or the heart.
"How could I not do a heart?" Villegas asked. "How could anybody not do a heart?" |
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Vallarta Living | Art Talk | June 2005 
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