But in Oaxaca color comes from nature, not Crayola. Tropical hues
literally grow on trees, in bougainvillea and trumpet vines
lounging over walls, in jacaranda blooming purple overhead, in
papayas and pomegranates and oranges picked for sale in the
marketplace. Even the earth and mountains range their own striking
palette, mineral gray to pale sand. Oaxaqueños take these colors,
the hues of sky and flower and leaf and earth, and spread them on
the things they make, whether buildings or household items or
clothing - or their art.
"Oaxaca has everything: climate, ruins, colonial art, beautiful
churches," says Graciela Cervantes, director of Galería Quetzalli,
the city's first fine-art gallery. "The market is full of so many
colors, the sky is so blue - people here are surrounded by this
beauty from childhood, by everything that makes art. It gets into
their eyes."
The valley and mountains circling Oaxaca City are full of villages
sustained by the art and handicraft produced there. In San Antonio
Arrazola and San Martin Tílcajete, for instance, the villagers
create folk-art alebríjes, fantastical creatures of wood and
shocking
paint that capture the fancy of collectors north of the
border. In Teotitlán del Valle, the craft is weaving, transforming
hand-dyed wool into rugs and tapestries. In San Bartolo Coyótepec,
artisans shape indigenous black clay into pottery. Parents,
children, grandparents sit carving, painting, dyeing, weaving day
after day, rather than scraping their living from the fields or
abandoning their hometowns for Mexico City.
In these villages some artisans work in collaboratives, others
under a family umbrella, others under the signature of one person,
typically a man. Some of the showrooms are bright, polished,
air-conditioned, with sales staff and price lists. Others aren't
showrooms at all, but the courtyard of a family dwelling or an
open-air shelter on the street side of a residence. Floors are dirt
and wares laid on folding tables, and we have to interrupt the
artisans at work to ask for prices. They eagerly demonstrate their
talents, and here the slick shops seem one step divorced from the
act of creation.