With its current exhibition/project, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) is presently densely packed and aswirl with collaborative sight, sound, and touch energies; multimedia resources; and sociohistorical ideas. But at the center of this thought-provoking maelstrom is a tiny insect.
That would be the tiny but mighty cochineal, found in the nopal cactus in Oaxaca and long cultivated by the Zapotec people as a source of a mythic red dye coveted for fabric and textile work. The cochineal, exported from Mexico to distant lands for centuries, becomes both a literal subject and central metaphor for a show whose title conveys its ambitious objective: Sangre de Nopal/Blood of the Nopal: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Contemporary Art.
MCASB’s exhibition, involving a wide array of artists and video subjects, was curated by John Connelly, Dalia García, and Audrey Lopez and is a companion piece to an exhibition at UCLA’s Fowler Museum. Both are part of the large-scale PST Art project “Art & Science Collide.”