Entijuanarte 08

Jose Luis Cuevas, one of Mexico's top Modern Painters will be at the Forth Annual ENTIJAUNARTE art festival; the most important art event on the Northwest of Mexico.

Entijuanarte, the most important art event in Northwest of Mexico will gather more than 155 Mexican and international artists this October 4th and 5th in the Tijuana Cultural Center in the City of Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. Since 2005 Entijuanarte has given the opportunity to artist from Mexico, but mostly from the Tijuana and San Diego, California region an opportunity to exhibit their work to more than 30,000 visitors each year, this is the 4th year in a row that Entijuanarte presents this public cultural event.

The event will host plastic and visual arts; there will be 155 artists, 8 art collectives, 3 galleries, live music and dance performances, more than 10 hours of conferences, roundtable discoussions and meetings. Julio Rodriguez, General Director of Entijuanarte explained, We are amazed with the response of artists, our enrollment this year grew by 80%, which shows the interest and support of both local and foreign artists in this festival born in Tijuana. We received aproximatly 140 proposals from Tijuana artists in addition to other cities and groups. Undoubtedly this event demostrates another face of the City, one that illustrates that Baja California talent continues each year to impact even more on the Workd art scene.

The goal of this event is to be an inclusive forum of expression an invitation to live art freely, with active participation from the community. We have fulfilled our purpose of being an alternative art forum; we are distinguished for supporting emerging artists and promoting citizen participation said Julio Rodriguez.

This year the festival will be enriched with the honorable presence of modernist painter, drawer, engraver and sculptor Jose Luis Cuevas, one of the starters of Rupture Generation in the 1950's.

Without doubt, Entijuanarte'08 will be the showcase of leisure activity and meeting point for all cultural and artistic diversity of the Baja California and Southern California region; consolidated as one of the biggest festivals in the country with roots in the community. Some of the artists that will be showcased are:

Entijuanarte a Retrospective.

Text: Cecilia Ochoa V.

Entijuanarte was born as an independent cultural project that takes place annually the first week of October. It started in 2005, offering a professional platform that concentrates a great variety of plastic and visual artists from the all over the region; exhibiting their art all in one location to more than 30,000 visitors that attend each year.

This art summit is open to the public free of charge and offers an important education program that includes keynote speakers, workshops, and roundtable discussions focused on the many disciplines of art. The event has given the opportunity to more than 350 artists to display their work and involve the binational San Diego-Tijuana region on a great artistic festival of unique qualities within Mexico.

Entijuanarte offers a unique format of exhibition and extramural activities; provides an opportunity for the public to approach art freely and without inhibitions, without the rigid formats of a typical museum or gallery, which allows freedom to establish a direct dialogue with artists, in a very casual way offering both the artist and the viewer the ability to confront their impressions, achieving real learning and an enriching dialogue.

Entijuanarte is geared to all audiences of different ages and from all socioeconomic backgrounds, presenting both experienced and emerging artists, of different disciplines of visual and plastics arts, such as painting, sculpture, photography, graphic design, digital art, installation art, performance, video, art sound, object arts, collective art, and, of course, music, theatre and dance.

To this day, one of the groundbreaking cultural impacts Entijuanarte has achieved is the fact that 90% of the 90,000 people that have attended are of recent incursion in to the arts, not used to this type of cultural events; this is an unprecedented accomplishment in our region.

Entijuanarte has given the entire community the opportunity to be close to and learn about the work of artists with outstanding trajectories; true representatives of art in Mexico. In the 2007 edition of the festival the work of three great Oaxaca masters, Rufino Tamayo, Francisco Toledo and Rodolfo Morales, appeared for the first time in Tijuana.

This 2008 festival will feature Master Jose Luis Cuevas, who will lead a discussion open to all attendees, supported by a large format projection of his major works over the walls of the Centro Cultural Tijuana. The approach to this cultural wealth of our country, is new in Tijuana, and is undoubtedly one of the great contributions of Entijuanarte to the cultural development of this region.

As an ongoing effort to promote cultural development, Entijuanarte has published weekly since August 2006 a full page section on art and culture in the daily newspaper El Mexicano, the largest circulation regional publication in Baja California. This way, Entijuanarte reaches the 5 municipalities of the State, in order to encourage, promote, inform and enrich the cultural artistic process, by following the various artistic events that occur every day in our region. This publication of Entijuanarte Press, contributes to the improvement of the image of Tijuana.

Finally, it should be noted that Entijuanarte has also created a new dimension bringing Cultural Tourism to Tijuana, new visitors that are interested in the plastic and visual arts of this great border. Without a doubt, the artistic experience, creativity, quality and talent of those involved, and the great effort of organization and logistics of the festival, are factors that have motivated an increase in this tourism category, which is essential for the development of the region.