Founded by Sally Lilienthal, M.I.X. (1972–75) aimed to broaden the museum’s outreach and engagement with local communities to reflect the diversity of San Francisco by offering community events that included concerts, performances, exhibitions, and mural commissions, hosted both at the museum as well as public venues throughout various San Francisco neighborhoods. As part of its charge, M.I.X. sought to include artists of minorities within the museum’s exhibition circuit, launching the M.I.X. exhibition series. In its first year, Jenkins and Castellón served as the joint program director and coordinator of M.I.X. After 1972, Castellón directed the program until its discontinuation in 1975.
As the final show in the M.I.X. exhibition circuit, Posters and Society appropriately featured contemporary practices in poster production in the 1970s, a community-driven medium that had flourished in the Bay Area since the 1960s. At that time, there was a proliferation of graphic workshops: the Graphic Arts Workshop, Kearny Street Workshop, Black Panther Press, Crown Point Press, and La Raza Silkscreen Center, among many others in the region. Indeed, driven by the sociopolitical struggles of the decade, posters became an inevitable medium for graphic communication at the intersection of community, art, and activism. As Castellón writes in the curatorial statement for the exhibition, local tendencies in poster production by the mid-1970s could be divided into two categories: “public information and social/political commentary.” The exhibition brought together a range of artists, including notable figures such as Rupert García, Ralph Maradiaga, and Irene Pérez. All of whom deeply engaged in community arts and were instrumental in founding local art organizations, from Galería de la Raza (cofounded by García and Maradiaga) to Mujeres Muralistas (cofounded by Pérez). Through different technical and stylistic approaches, these posters highlight community events and speak to struggles and political causes that navigate between the local and the global.
Rolando Castellón (b.1937) is a Nicaraguan artist and curator who moved to San Francisco in 1956 at the age of nineteen. During his time living in the Bay Area, he was a prominent advocate for community arts programming and minority artists, working actively as a practicing artist, curator, gallerist, and cultural worker. In the late 1960s, he became involved with Casa Hispana de Bellas Artes, serving as the director of artistic programs in 1969. Coming out of this work, Castellón became a cofounder of Galería de la Raza in 1970 and was elected as the Galería’s first director before it became more established and moved away from a cooperative model. After two years, he left Galería to work at SFMOMA, first as the program coordinator and art director of M.I.X. (1972–75), and later as a full-time curator (1975–81). After his appointments at SFMOMA, he served as the director of the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery at UC Santa Cruz (1982–92). During this time, he opened different iterations of Castellón Gallery, and curated exhibitions at various venues across San Francisco; among them, Drawings from the Fourth World at Meridian Gallery in 1989. In 1993, he moved back to Costa Rica, where he had briefly lived as a young boy, and was appointed the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MADC) in 1994. He continues to live and work in San José, Costa Rica.
