Sylvia Orozco

Women & Their Work presented an international performance art event, PERFORMANCE ART IN MEXICO at the Arts Warehouse. This program featured a performance and videotapes produced and presented by Sylvia Orozco. She is a visual and video artist who had recently returned from seven years in Mexico City.

PERFORMANCE ART IN MEXICO featured a look at a contemporary art form and its development in Mexico. Sylvia Orozco’s performance art reflects her roots as a Mexican-American woman, her activities as co-founder of the Art Research and Information Center in Mexico City, and her studies at the National School of Fine Arts of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Performance art was a new art form at the time which was created by women in the 1960s and 1970s, in response to the exclusionary policies of male-run galleries and museums. Performance art combines narration, ritual, theatre, movement, social issues, autobiography, public performance, and audience involvement. It can be performed in many nontraditional art settings; the artist is often featured as both actor and medium.

“I would like to provide a window for viewing contemporary art forms in Mexico to Texas artists and art audiences,” said Sylvia Orozco, who showed videotapes of her own performance work, as well as that of other artists in Mexico. “In Mexico, the exclusionary policies of museums particularly affect young, experimental artists. Performance art is an important way for artists to be seen and to enable their work to make statements to large numbers of people without using the traditional route of the official museums.”