Padrinos
Sergio Mondragón’s Itzli table lamps were inspired by the zig-zag shape of Aztec incense burners (image: Ely Dominguez).
“Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong,” interior designer Sergio Mondragón says, shaking his head as he remembers the weeks leading up to curatorial collective Of Threads’ exhibition, El Listón Café, at San Francisco’s Glass Rice gallery. “My car had problems, my dog was in the hospital. I was trying to build the show, curate the show, and make my lamps,” he continues, eyes wide. “Without the help of my family, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”
Mondragón enlisted his father, mother and grandmother to help make his designs, with his family even pulling an all-nighter to finish off his pieces. This origin story is fitting for the debut exhibition of the collective Mondragón cofounded with fellow interior designer Alma Lopez to celebrate Mexican American creatives and the making traditions that many of them have been raised with. “My mom was always making crafts with us, and my dad was always building things,” Mondragón says, explaining that his dad built parts of their family home. “I don't think the art world is very respected in Latin communities, because it’s something that doesn't thrive very well,” he says. “[But] we have design, we’re always thinking about crafts and ways of making things.”
One of the rooms in the exhibition was designed to look like a Mexican American living room (image: Ely Dominguez).
The exhibition begins with artist Serena Madrigal’s star-shaped piñatas with tassels made out of lace and ribbons, and a silky brown curtain leads visitors past Lopez’s ceramic vase shaped like ruffled skirt caught mid-twirl and Mondragón’s zig-zag shaped La Luz De Itzli table lamp, whose form was inspired by Aztec[1] incense burners. Mondragón made the lampshade out of corn husks which he wetted and folded over a wooden frame before his mother hand-stitched them together. The resulting lamp is warm and airy, with light glowing through the translucent husks and casting papery shadows in their creases. “I named the lamp after Itzli, the god of obsidian,” Mondragón explains. “The Aztecs used obsidian as a black mirror, to reflect and to see into the future.” His design nods towards this history with an obsidian dimmer switch and a mirror-dipped bulb which visitors can stare into like a looking glass.
The following room is set up like a Mexican American home. Here, Alex Ortega’s black lacquer coffee table sprouts calla lilies from a vase embedded in its centre, and Mondragón’s ceiling lamp, which was inspired by watching his grandmother embroider napkins, hangs above it. As his grandmother de-threaded a piece of fabric to create a grid pattern before adding flowers and other details, Mondragón was struck by the simplicity of the unadorned lattice. "I was like, ‘Grandma, stop, this is beautiful, I need this piece of fabric,’” Mondragón remembers. “And she was like, ‘This is garbage,’” he laughs. But Mondragón convinced her and his mother to de-thread some fabric while he supervised, asking them to stop at certain points to create fringes and uneven sections. “There was a lot of collaboration and a lot of arguments,” he says. Using papier-mâché, a technique he learned from making piñatas for birthday parties, he created a triangular frame with a lightbulb and an incense burner dangling in between three panels of white fabric.
Mondragón with his hanging lamp and incense burner, La Copalera De La Abuela, which he named after his grandmother (image: Ely Dominguez).
Mondragón named the lamp La Copalera De La Abuela after his grandmother, and many of the other pieces in the exhibition also pay tribute to their designers’ ancestors. Chris Cisneros Gonzalez’s light box is emblazoned with the phrase “Yo Soy El Sueño” (I am the dream) to honour the sacrifices his family made to give him a better life, and fashion designer Juan Fernando Valdez’s shirt is embroidered with the logo of a fictitious band to pay homage to his father’s dreams of being in a musical group. “We have been fed up with a lot of things happening in the news, we don’t want the Mexican community to be represented in a very negative way politically,” Mondragón says. “This is our way of making our people shine.” Reflecting on the experience of putting the show together, he conjures the image of community members stepping forward in his time of need like fairy godmothers. “We joked that El Listón Café has padrinos, you know, godparents that help you out,” he says. “I think that is what’s so beautiful about the Mexican community.”
[1] The term “Aztec” was used by Europeans as an umbrella term for several ethnic groups living in the region at the time of the Spanish conquest. The term is still commonly used, often to refer to people that called themselves the Mexica. Mondragón’s pieces were inspired by his childhood visits to the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, which still uses the term “Aztec” in its exhibits and descriptions, though it also acknowledges the Mexica as a key group within the broader context of Mesoamerican civilisations.
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown