My Experience of Visiting The Denver Art Museum

Cultural Activity 1 – Redo

Over the weekend, I was able to visit the Denver Art Museum and view a collection called Mi Tierra: Contemporary Artists Explore Place. The collection included pieces by 13 Latino artists where each artist tried to portray their individual experiences in the American West through their art. The collection contained many different forms of art and portrayed a range of experiences that the artists had ranging from the topics of labor and memory to displacement and visibility but all in relation to how the Western United States is a melting pot of cultures.

My visit to the Denver Art Museum and exposure to the Mi Tierra: Contemporary Artists Explore Place collection are related to Latin/o cultures in many ways. Every piece of art in the collection portrayed a unique experience that only the Latino artist who created it had. Some of the experiences were more positive while others seemed more negative and some showed a good mixture of both. The piece that I thought was most interesting was Claudio Dicochea’s Songs of the Horizon. His work was a collection of paintings that ties in American pop culture with the Latino culture to show the meshing of the two to become one.

This experience taught me a lot about some of the differences and similarities between the Latino and American cultures. I was able to see how in some ways the cultures have meshed together overtime while each still keeping some of their own distinct attributes. I was also able to learn about some of the more negative experiences that Latino Americans have as a result of stereotyping and generalizations. As someone who is not as cultured, this gave me an appreciation for the strength and ability to find humor in the ignorance of others that people from Latino cultures have. I also gained an appreciation for the different kinds art that were used to portray the experiences of each of the Latino artist included in the collection.

Works Cited

1. Ancona, R. (2018). Latino/a art activism: Engaging culture and change. University of Texas Press.
2. Ayala, K. J., & Medina, C. (Eds.). (2017). Latino art and culture in the United States: The Mexican-American experience. ABC-CLIO.
3. Debro, A. S. (2019). Artistic diversity in contemporary Latino/a art: Exhibiting cultures and identities. University of Arizona Press.
4. Delgado, M. C. (2017). Latino art in the US: Beyond stereotypes. Smithsonian American Art Museum.
5. Espino, C. M. (2016). Latino art collection: Tattoo-Inspired Chicano, Maya, Aztec and Mexican Styles. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
6. Flores, L. E. (2014). Mexican American Mojo: Popular music, dance, and urban culture in Los Angeles, 1935–1968. Duke University Press.
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10. Paredes, A., & Cantu, R. (2018). Latino/a literature in the classroom: Twenty-first-century approaches to teaching. Routledge.