Felipe Ehrenberg
Felipe Ehrenberg (27 June 1943, Tlacopac, Mexico City, 1943 – 15 May 2017, Cuernavaca City, Mexico) was a Mexican artist, editor, essayist, teacher and activist, Neologist. Internationally recognized for his pioneering work in mail art, media art, performance and installations. His work as a precursor of artist's editions and books and as founder of Beau Geste Press has also been fundamental.
After the events of 1968, a crucial year in the political and student movements around the world and especially in Mexico, he decided to go into exile with his family in England. There, together with David Mayor and Martha Hellion, he founded Beau Geste Press / Libro Acción Libre, a collective dedicated to presenting the work of visual poets, conceptual artists, neo-Dadaists and experimental artists, many of them linked to the Fluxus movement.
He returned to Mexico at the end of 1973 and joined Víctor Muñoz, Carlos Finck and José Antonio Hernández Amezcua to found the Grupo Proceso Pentágono, one of the seminal events that gave rise to what would later become known as "el Movimiento de los grupos" (the Group Movement).
In 1975 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1979 he formed H2O (Haltos 2 Ornos) Talleres de Comunicación, a group formed by 25 art instructors to rethink models of independent publishing and teach mural painting workshops.
In 1984 he traveled as a guest professor to the Art Institute of Chicago's School of Art, where he taught the seminar Art and Politics. The 1985 earthquake changed the course of his life. He moved to the Tepito neighborhood and there he coordinated the reconstruction program Barrio a Barrio, an organization dedicated to the promotion of self-help based on experiences with residents. For this work he was awarded the Roque Dalton medal by the Council for Cooperation with Culture and Science in El Salvador (CONCISES) in 1987.
In 1990, he was invited as artist-in-residence at Nexus Press, Atlanta, published the Codex Aeroscriptus Ehrenbergensis, an anthology of his iconographic collection of stencils and, in October of that same year, created the installation Light Up Our Border - I, for the Archer Huntington Gallery at the University of Texas, Austin. A month later he created Light Up Our Border - II at the Bridge Center For Contemporary Art in El Paso, Texas. These two works, along with Curtain Call, are part of the installation presented at In-SITE 94, San Diego/Tijuana.
Between 2001 and 2006 he was Mexico's cultural attaché in Brazil. In 2008 Manchuria-visión periférica, the first retrospective of his work, was inaugurated at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, and was subsequently presented at the Museum of Latin American Art in Los Angeles in May 2010 and at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo in September of the same year.
In 2017 the CAPC Museum in Burdeos presents the Beau Geste Press exhibition. In that same year, Ehrenberg died in Cuernavaca City, Mexico. (Source)
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