with an artwork from our exhibition Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art MuseumToday's feature, Codex for the 21st Century, is inspired by ancient Mexican and Central American cultures.
Celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month
with an artwork from our exhibition Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art MuseumToday's feature, Codex for the 21st Century, is inspired by ancient Mexican and Central American cultures.
Against a stark background, one hundred pairs of nails twist around one another, suggesting images of chromosomes, dancers—even, as Trejo points out, the Kama Sutra. The nails, which were specifically bent and rusted by the artist, can be reconfigured. The resulting images resemble abstract characters on a futuristic three-dimensional codex.
Ruben Trejo was born in a boxcar in the Burlington Railroad Yard in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His father worked for the railroad and his mother and siblings worked the fields as migrant laborers. Trejo recognized that Chicano artists were experiencing "cultural doldrums," and as a way to "drive some life into our visual culture," he looked to ancient Aztec and Mayan codices for inspiration.
At The Mexican Museum in 1992, Trejo was among several artists commissioned to make collective works that symbolically gathered the lost picture books of the Americas, burned by colonial administrations during the Spanish conquest.
This Codex for the 21st Century represents another step in that direction, although Trejo communicates in a language that the viewer can only attempt to understand.
This deceptively simple work allows the viewer to assume the role of an archaeologist discovering a new, not-yet-deciphered language while engaging in a dialogue about art and culture.
See Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum at the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago through November 11, 2001.
Source: Jonathan Yorba. Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2001).
Pictured: Ruben Trejo, born 1937, Codex for the 21st Century, 1997, bent and welded nails, 100 pairs, 60 x 240 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Julia D. Strong Endowment and the Acquisitions Gift Fund.