Mid-America Arts Alliance Receives National Endowment for the Arts Funding for Exhibition of Mexican Women Photographers</b>

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

JANUARY 10, 2003

Mid-America Arts Alliance Receives National Endowment for the Arts Funding for Exhibition of Mexican Women Photographers

Kansas City, MO--Mid-America Arts Alliance announces that it has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for $100,000 to tour El Ojo Fino/The Exquisite Eye, an exhibition of photographs from nine prominent women photographers of Mexico, through its national museum service division, ExhibitsUSA.

The grant comes from a Regional Leadership Initiative through the National Endowment for the Arts. The exhibition is intended to be part of a larger NEA initiative to provide a cross-cultural platform for Americans to experience the arts of Mexico.

"Mid-America Arts Alliance and ExhibitsUSA are very honored to receive support from the NEA to give American museum-goers access to these important figures in contemporary photography of Mexico," states Mary Kennedy McCabe, Executive Director of Mid-America Arts Alliance. "The funding will enhance our services to the institutions who host El Ojo Fino/The Exquisite Eye, continuing our goal of reaching further into communities with culturally diverse, unique art experiences that would be otherwise unavailable."

ExhibitsUSA will tour El ojo fino/The Exquisite Eye to communities throughout the United States beginning in July of this year. Through the support from the National Endowment for the Arts, ExhibitsUSA will design and produce a comprehensive package of educational and programming materials to accompany the exhibition, including a bilingual exhibition catalogue, and artist residency programs. The funding will also provide exhibition fee, lecture, and shipping subsidies, increasing access to the exhibition for smaller museums in under-served communities.

El ojo fino/The Exquisite Eye features the works of nine photographers: Lola Álvarez Bravo, Kati Horna, Mariana Yampolsky, Graciela Iturbide, Flor Garduño, Yolanda Andrade, Alicia Ahumada, Ángeles Torrejón, and Maya Goded. These artists from three generations have collectively reached across the 20th century and present a broad spectrum of photographic subjects.

From Lola Álvarez Bravo, one of the most prominent of the first generation of women photographers in Mexico, to Graciela Iturbide, with an international reputation as one of Mexico's premier contemporary photographers, this tour presents the work of a truly unique sisterhood of artists made available for the first time to venues across the country. Because each generation of photographers mentored the next, their images have an extensive aesthetic connection-little homages here and there, borrowed elements, overlapping spiritual territory, similar lives. Each woman is an accomplished artist in her own right, with a body of work well able to stand on its own, but the kinship among the nine is particularly striking when their photographs are seen together.

The exhibition is curated by Connie Todd of the Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern and Mexican Photography at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.

ExhibitsUSA was founded in 1988 to create access to an array of arts and humanities exhibitions, nurture the development and understanding of diverse art forms and cultures, and encourage the expanding depth and breadth of cultural life in local communities. Over the past 14 years, more than 14 million visitors in 800 communities in all 50 states and abroad have viewed an ExhibitsUSA exhibition.

Mid-America Arts Alliance, founded in 1972, is a non-profit regional arts organization based in Kansas City, Missouri. It is governed by a board of directors drawn from its partner states of Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. Major support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, participant state arts agencies, and leading foundations and corporations. For further information, visit the Mid-America Arts Alliance Web site at www.maaa.org or contact Daniel Billingsley at (816) 421-1388.