Venegas and Venegas

Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York is pleased to present Venegas and Venegas, an exhibition of Mexican photographers Yvonne Venegas and Jose Luis Venegas. The exhibition is part of Celebrate Mexico Now Festival, a citywide celebration of the art and culture of Mexico. Ares Casado is the curator.

Yvonne Venegas’s first solo show in New York, the exhibition will include a selection from three of her projects that deal with class, aspiration, and the rituals and lifestyles of upper income communities in Tijuana and San Pedro, Monterrey. Juxtaposed with this work will be 1970’s photographs from the archive of her father, Jose Luis Venegas, a wedding and event photographer in Tijuana.

José Luis Venegas began his career in Tijuana in the early 1970’s, becoming an important part of a developing upper-middle class. His work has influenced his daughter’s aesthetic from the beginning. She uses a social documentary photographer’s strategies to approach people that could be her father’s clients, and transforms what she sees into images that function in the realm of fine art. The exhibition explores her new body of work, entitled San Pedro Garza García, along with her past series, Maria Elvia de Hank, and her first major series, The Most Beautiful Brides of Baja California.

Yvonne Venegas was born in Long Beach, Ca, and grew up in Tijuana, Mexico. Graduated from ICP in NY, she received her MFA from UC San Diego. She has shown her work individually and in group shows throughout the US, Mexico, Poland, Spain, France and Canada. Recent exhibitions have been at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles; Casa de America in Madrid, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. In 2010 she received the Magnum Expression Award and in 2015 the Sistema Nacional de Creadores Grant by the Mexican Cultural Fund, which supports her work for three years. She has published two monographs of her work Maria Elvia de Hank and Inedito, both by the editorial house RM. This year she received the support of the Bancomer Foundation to publish her third book titled Gestus which is an investigation into portraiture in Mexico City. Her work is part of public and private collections around the world including the San Francisco MOMA, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Alumnos 47, Televisa Foundation, Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, Anna Gamazo de Abello, Kyosato Museum of Photography, Hunderschild Collection among others.

Ares Casado was born in Madrid, Spain. She has been working in the field of cultural management and cultural affairs for nine years. She worked for two years as cultural manager at the Spanish Embassy in México, where she promoted Spanish films and musical acts. She has worked in the area of curating, production coordination and programming of art shows, as well as film festivals and cultural events all around México, Madrid, and New York City, were she has lived for four years. Her studies include a B.A. in Law, and a M.A in Cultural Management and Policy. She is currently pursuing a B.A. in Art History.

The exhibition is part of a series of guest-curated exhibitions at BAXTER ST at CCNY resulting from an open call for proposals, and is made possible in part by generous support from public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; The Mexican Consulate in New York; The Mexican Cultural Institute of New York; Celebrate Mexicio Now; Laboratorio Mexicano de Imagens; and Conaculta Fonca.