Natalia Anciso

The work I chose to write about for week 8 is Natalia Anciso’s Joe. Joe is Anciso’s work from 2011, created by pen, watercolor and embroidery on fabric. It features a man presumable named “Joe” hanging from the top in black and white, while colorful flowers surround the borders. When I first saw this image during the class presentations, I was curious to what the story behind this work might be. It seemed gruesome in some way, yet somehow looked bright due to the bold colors of the flowers. When I looked it up on Anciso’s website, it is said that Joe is part on an ongoing series called the Pinches Rinches, where Anciso looks at the suppressed historical events surrounding the executions and lynchings of Mexicans and Tejanos by Texas Rangers along the Texas Borderlands, post-Texas Revolution. I think it is very interesting how Natalia Anciso took these two very opposite images and formed it to fit into one form of art. The bright, bold colors of the flowers contrast the hanging figure and I believe it makes the scene more dramatic; somewhat sad, yet beautiful. I looked through Anciso’s other works in the Pinches Rinches series, and I really like how she uses the bright watercolors to contrast the black and white images of rangers and the people.