M.I.X.: A Third World Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, curated through the Museum Intercommunity Exchange (M.I.X.), was the first exhibition in these mediums to feature solely “third world” artists, predominantly from the Bay Area, at the San Francisco Museum of Art (later renamed the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1975). Among them are notable figures such as Jose Ramon Lerma, Carlos Villa, and Raymond Saunders. Though the exhibition title refers to traditional mediums, the exhibited works spanned a gamut of processes that blurred categorical distinctions: mixed-media, installation, photography, and in certain instances, the inclusion of live props. As part of the exhibition programming, the museum organized a conference to accompany the show, serving as a platform for participating artists to engage with critics, fellow artists, and the public. Rolando Castellón, who served as one of the jurors, was at that time the program coordinator and director of the program. The original catalogue is made of a denim pocket with seventy-two pages and thirty-six plates and contains a brief statement by Castellón.
The exhibition not only marked a first for the museum but also served as one of the first major institutional efforts to explicitly center artists of color, a commitment that also extended to the jury members and to the curatorial and exhibition programming. In this way, A Third World Painting and Sculpture Exhibition began a lineage of “Third World exhibitions” from this period that sought to disrupt institutional hegemonies and racial marginalization within the art world. In the Bay Area, it also set a precedent for curatorial interventions that decentered a canon of white artists, serving as a reference point for local exhibitions. This includes Other Sources: An American Essay, curated by Carlos Villa, at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1976.
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. The project consisted of community programming 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.
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.
