A Little Mexican Mural and Other Things is a tour de force of the artist’s talent for combining forms and meanings, and fusing contrasting cultures and traditions. The mural in the title, as well as the objects included in it form an oeuvre of great simplicity that grows exponentially in light of the nature of the materials employed, their constitution and symbolic resonances.

One of Laurie Litowitz’s artistic assets lies in her ability to seek and find new materials, combining them with outdated techniques to bring to the fore a distinctive work that shows appreciation for otherness, that which is different. She has done so with fabrics and leaves found in India, with chicken bones and seeds, with typographic families or old postcards and even with the words from many languages world-wide.

For this series of work Litowitz resorted to a traditional American craft belonging to the female domestic realm, creating bricolage circles of leftover fabric that are then woven together to create colorful quilts for use in the home.

For every image there is a material support that speaks of a particular cultural aesthetic. Thus I would describe Litowitz’s modus operandi and strategy. Her use of that craft leads to an allegory of our present day; particularly when the artist substitutes the fabrics with multicolored plastics found everywhere, such as plastic bags given away by street vendors or at convenience stores. Plastic culture has turned into the common denominator of our time.

Far from being a lament about the disappearance of crafts, Litowitz’s work suffuses plastic with a playful as well as symbolic dimension. As craft, the color and repetition of shapes elaborate on the traditional meanings of color of decorations that adorn popular festivities in Oaxaca or India; artistically the grouping of color circles reminds one of breaking of light into its constituents, an optical effect understood and exploited by the Pointillists and Futurists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What is the relation between Litowitz’s mural and the traditional Mexican mural she refers to in her title? To begin with the mural is not painted on the wall permanently; instead it is an ephemeral configuration of moveable materials. Thus, the reading of this mural arises from the territory of parody and the everyday. One should look into ordinary reality for the origin of this mural, perhaps in the colorful displays of crafts and other wares found in public markets and carnivals that flourish in any city.

------Laurie Litowitz. Mesa de la paz. 2002

Laurie Litowitz’s proposal rings with the echo of the works of the Brazilian Neoconcrete artists from the ‘60s, who took visual arts into other realms, adapting media such as textiles and samba dancing (as in the parangoles created by Helio Oiticica), or the revival of psychedelia in strung bead work (in the works of Brazilian Beatriz Milhazes) and the use of industrial paint color samplers with references to pop- culture icons, as seen in the work by Polly Apfelbaum. The strategy reveals a fusion of opposed cultural traditions and artistic trends, such as baroque and op art, and embroidery and the found object.

By erasing the limits between popular and visual arts Litowitz creates a hybrid language, flowering with sensuality and multicultural references, in which the individuality of the artists has been subordinated, making way for a collective sensibility. Deprived of a textual message, but charged with visual and plastic qualities, Litowitz’s mural points to the real and the material wonders of popular culture. If the arabesque forms are consubstantial to the moving baroque imagery, Laurie Litowitz’s mural points to only one movement: a central line in a minimalist composition that slants bit by bit and establishes a rhythmic counterpoint amidst the chromatic particles of the mosaic. The serial production of the artwork, to which several women contributed, rejects the modern fallacy of the individual-artist-author, and places these works in the realm of irony and parody, in which the masculine authority inherent in mural painting and its identity with national values are substituted by the appreciation of hand-made crafts, the female sensibility and the festive spontaneity of the ephemeral.

Through her talent for building bridges between cultures, techniques and materials, between ways of saying and ways of making, Laurie Litowitz attests to art’s ability to play with possibilities and to establish a dialogue between the self and the other, the rite of the everyday and the exceptional within her purview.