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 II: Drawings showcased a range of drawings exploring diverse themes rendered in different media including ink, pencil, pen, charcoal, and crayon. In his curatorial statement, Castellón highlights how the show foregrounded contemporary tendencies through works by Bay Area artists of color, whose drawings range from spare lines to expressive mixed-media works that blur the boundary between mediums. As he put it, the drawings in the exhibition provide an intimate window that produces “thought, movement, reality” at times drawing attention to social realities and cultural references specific to the artist. Among the artists featured in this exhibition were notable figures such as René Yañez (cofounder and director of Galería de la Raza) as well as Consuelo Mendez and Graciela Carrillo, both of whom formed Mujeres Muralistas that same year, alongside Patricia Rodiguez and Irene Pérez.
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.
