Olga Costa - Painting and Cultural Promotion

Painting and Cultural Promotion

Olga Costa was one of a number of prominent female artists in 20th century Mexico, along with María Izquierdo, Lola Cueto and Helen Escobedo although the field was dominated by men. Although she studied very briefly at the Academy of San Carlos, she began to paint in 1936 “as a game” she said with no intentions of doing it professionally. This began in while she followed her husband, José Chávez Morado to Xalapa, Veracruz to open a painting school and paint the halls of the teachers’ college there. Chávez Morado encouraged her to experiment although she was hesitant about it.

Through her husband, Costa was active in Mexico’s cultural and intellectual scenes, where she became friends with Galería de Arte Mexicano owner Inés Amor. Amor invited Costa to exhibit her work for the first time in 1945, with major individual exhibits at the same gallery in 1948, 1950, 1962 and 1971. Amor was also the first to start sending Costa’s work to the United States where it received higher prices. Other individual exhibits include El Cuchitril (1954), the Galería de Arte Contemporáneo (1955), Centro Cultural Ignacio Ramírez in San Miguel Allende (1965), the Instituto Cultural Mexicano-Israelí (1969), the Galería de Arte in Monterrey (1969), the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana (1950, 1963, 1972, 1983), the Galerá de Arte Contemporáneo (1974, 1975), the Alhóndiga de Granaditas (1975), the Galería Lourdes Chumacero (1977), the Palacio de Bellas Artes (1979), and the Festival Internacional Cervantino (1985, 1986). She also participated in numerous collective exhibits in Mexico and abroad. Her work was also exhibited at the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1990.

Her major canvas works include Cabeza arcaica, La novia, Figuras en el trópico algo tiesas, Casa azul 3, Casa roja, Follajes azules, Pueblo minero de noche, Ladera and Niebla although her best known work is probably La vendadora de frutas from 1951. In addition to painting, she spent most of her life on various projects to promote the arts in Mexico. In 1941, she opened the Galería La Espiral along with her husband, Angelina Beloff, Gabriel Fernández Ledesma, Germán Cueto, Francisco Zúñiga and Feliciano Peña, which Costa directed. The art gallery was more of a meeting place for artists rather than a business for selling artwork and welcome foreign contacts such as Malú Block, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Henry Clifford of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the first the promote foreign artists in Mexico. In 1943, the gallery moved and morphed into a house on Paseo de la Reforma and became the Sociedad de Arte Moderno. This society sponsored a major exhibition of the works of Picasso with the collaboration of Inés Amor.

She became a member of the Socieded para el Impulso de las Artes Plásticas in 1948, and the following year she was a co founder of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana .

In addition to her canvas and promotional work, Costa worked with the theatre and created one mural. She worked on the set and wardrobe design of the Ballet Waldeen in 1942, the wardrobe for Homenaje a García Lorca in 1949 and El hombre fue hecho de maíz in the 1950s. In 1952 she created a mosaic mural called Motivos sobre el agua for the Agua Hedionda Spa in Cuautla .

Later in life, she and Chávez Morado worked on the creation of several museums in the state of Guanajuato. In 1975, they donated their collection of pre Hispanic, colonial and folk art to the museum of the Alhóndiga de Granaditas. In 1979 the couple founded the Museo del Pueblo de Guanajuato with 18th and 19th century pieces from their private collection. In 1993, the couple donated their home, a former hacienda in the city of Guanajuato to create the Casa de Arte Olga Costa-José Chávez Morado museum. It houses a permanent collection of 293 pieces acquired by the couple over their lifetimes of pieces from the 16th to 18th centuries, which includes ceramics, embroidered pieces, furniture, tapestries and glass, as well as works by both painters.

Near the end of her life, she received a number of recognitions for her artistic and cultural work, individually and along with her husband. A book about her life Olga Costa was published in 1984. In 1989, he received the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes . That same year she also was named a “Distinguished Daughter of Guanajuato” and was honored by the Festival Internacional Cervantino . In 1993, she received, along with her husband, the El Pípila de Plata prize from the city of Guanajuato. In 2000, the Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo held an exhibition about her and her husband’s lives. The state government of Guanajuato created the Bienal de Pintura y Escultura Olga Costa in her honor, which is a competition only for women artists.