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. Despite the program’s discontinuation in 1975, Castellón maintained the ethos of M.I.X. through his curatorial work by foregrounding artists of color within the museum’s exhibition circuit.
Rupert García/Pastel Drawings was organized during Castellón’s tenure as a curator at SFMOMA, following his role as director for the Museum Intercommunity Exchange (M.I.X.). The exhibition debuted a series of contemporary pastel drawings, highlighting García’s ongoing commitment to activism and Third World struggles, while foregrounding his technical innovations in print-based media and drawing during this period. In his curatorial statement, Castellón discusses García’s return to drawing through a hybrid process that involved superimposing silkscreens with pastel. This new approach brought to the fore the familiar subject matter that characterized his posters and prints from the 1960s and ‘70s, now reinvigorated by his use of mixed-media, larger formats, and vibrant expressionistic colors (see ICAA doc. no. 1082192). In her essay, artist Elizabeth Catlett emphasizes García’s rejection of the mainstream art world by threading together the presence and resistance of Third World populations and linking his Mexican identity to global struggles, which involved mapping a network of solidarity from California to Mexico, Vietnam, China, Iran, Africa, and Latin America. Much like Castellón, Catlett is keen to note García’s technical innovations, linking his interventions in print media and use of pastel to the liberatory forces that drive his artistic and social practice.
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.
