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.
M.I.X.: Third World Photographic Vision brought together a range of photographers living in San Francisco, who, as Castellón described, belonged to “local Third World communities.” Through diverse practices, these photographers employed various technical approaches and experimental interventions and drew inspiration from their communities and everyday life—often generating social commentary while constructing new realities. Included in the exhibition, and highlighted in the press release, was the work of Joe Ramos, a Filipino Mexican photographer from Salinas, California. Known for documenting life in his town, Ramos showcased a series of photographs-turned-postcards that chronicled the end of his Mexican American grandfather’s life. Mailed from Salinas, the postcards were accompanied by “philosophical witticisms” written by the artist. As noted in the press release, the postcards that were not intercepted and censored by the Postal Department were displayed in the show. The exhibition also featured the work of artists David Fukuyama and Yoshiki Sekiguchi. The show brought together seventy-five works and traveled to local community-based spaces, including the Kearny Street Workshop (June 9 through 30, 1973) and the San Francisco Waden Branch Library (July 18 through August 18, 1973), following its opening exhibition at the museum.
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.
