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 San Francisco. As part of its charge, M.I.X. sought to include artists of color 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. Graphics I: Prints showcased contemporary prints by fifteen artists whose works spanned lithographs, serigraphs, collagraphs, aquatints, and etchings. In his curatorial statement Castellón outlines the innovations of printmaking and the merits of print media in the Bay Area, highlighting the contribution of local artists who experimented with the limits of these various processes to unearth new techniques and thematic concerns. Among the artists included in the show were notable figures such as Rupert Garcia, Cleveland Bellow, and Ralph Maradiaga (cofounder of Galería de la Raza)—who displayed here an innovative series of photo-silkscreens presented in two-dimensional formats. As Castellón notes, while prints have proliferated exhibitions in the Bay Area, most of the prints in this exhibition are limited edition, including some artists’ proofs.
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.
