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It was raining confetti at Misericordia University on Wednesday night.
The deluge didn’t come from the ceiling, but from cascarones — hollowed eggshells filled with colorful bits of paper.
Visiting artist Marta Sanchez, whose paintings are displayed in an exhibit called “Hope and Memory” in the Pauly Friedman Art Gallery, showed the kids taking part in a children’s workshop how to get the most celebratory value from the cascarones as she cracked one over gallery director Lalaine Little’s head.
Soon, Calvin Baer of Dallas had some fresh-from-the-eggshell glitz spilling over his head, too. The 5-year-old got such a kick out of it, “he wants to sneak up (at home) and crack one over his dad’s head,” Calvin’s mom, Jennifer Baer, explained as her son and other youngsters decorated eggshells of their own, with encouragement from Sanchez.
“I made a whole egg family,” Calvin said, showing off half a dozen eggs in a carton.
“This is Mr. Buck Tooth, with a unibrow, and this is Mrs. Buck Tooth,” said 10-year-old Isaac Bishop, holding up a pair of eggshells he had decorated with faces.
Isaac’s grandmother, Ginny Murphy, of Dallas, had brought the boy and his brother, Oliver, 7, to the workshop. Her grandsons were visiting from Texas, which happens to be where artist Sanchez started out.
A native of San Antonio, Sanchez has been inspired by traditional Mexican folk art, including the retablos, or devotional pictures often found in churches.
She painted images of family and friends in the retablo style, hoping that people close to her would see their everyday lives “as priceless and miraculous. I also hoped that people that did not connect with my culture, in Texas and beyond, would see that we all felt universal love, despair, hope and dreams.”
“Latin teacher and dream therapist, like a visual shaman,” Sanchez wrote on one retablo, next to the image of a friend’s face. Alongside the image of her own feet she noted that they had walked many miles, “like my mother and sister” and wanted to “jump out of the cycle of poverty.”
“We were pretty poor,” she reminisced during the art workshop, chatting with a reporter as she sat by a table and, at young Calvin’s request, painted 100 dots onto an egg shell. “I got two degrees on my own volition; I found financial aid.”
It was when she was studying painting for her bachelor’s degree that she discovered retablos. “The University of Texas at Austin has a wonderful Latin American Collection,” she said. Later she earned a master of fine art in painting from Temple University and taught at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for more than 17 years.
Art lovers can admire many of Sanchez’s paintings through Aug. 9 at Misericordia, where they may notice some have been painted on tin or industrial corrugated metal. Some make use of “the rich greens and reds and yellows you would see in traditional Mexican folk paintings,” as Little, the gallery director, pointed out.
And some showcase various family members, from her grandfather the lion tamer to her father the floor finisher to her brother, Freddy, “awakening by the sea.”
The artist, who now teaches at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, has pieces in the collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the State Museum of Pennsylvania and The National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. Her work is also part of the private collection owned by actor/activist Cheech Marin. (In conjunction with the exhibit of her work, three guitars, each painted by a Chicano artist and part of the “Blazing Chicano Guitar” project Marin commissioned, are also on display at Misericordia.)
Some of Sanchez’ most recent work is a series of sculptures that top 100 feet of rebar barricade in Philadelphia, in an area where Conrail and city officials agreed to clean out an encampment of heroin users. The Philadelphia Inquirer described the area as having been “considered the largest open-air drug market on the East Coast” for years.
“It was changing something negative into something positive,” Sanchez said, flipping through photographs on her phone to show her sculptures, which were commissioned by HACE, the Hispanic Association of Contractors and Enterprises, which intends to build affordable senior housing units in the area.
Some of the sculptures incorporate angel wings, to honor people who have died. Others depict in bold orange the words of poet David Acosta, who included the sentiments of neighborhood residents.
“They call this the Badlands, but this is where my memories live,” the art spells out. “Mama singing in the kitchen. Abuelo playing dominoes.”
“It’s going to be a nice place now,” Sanchez said, “for kids walking to school.”
