Cielo Rojo XI, a painting by Maceo Montoya
The Notre Dame Center for Arts & Culture presents Cielo Rojo, paintings by Maceo Montoya, with the Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame, the Graduate School, and the Creative Writing Program.
Cielo Rojo opened February 2nd at two locations. The exhibition runs through March 31, 2015, at the Galería America in the Institute for Latino Studies on Notre Dame’s campus and at the Notre Dame Center for Arts & Culture.
Featuring paintings by Maceo Montoya, Cielo Rojo partners portraits and landscapes, inviting the viewer to generate relationships between, and narratives for, the images. This is a fitting invitation, considering Montoya’s background as an acclaimed writer and poet as well as a visual artist.
The following excerpt from Montoya’s Cielo Rojo Summer 2009 provides a glimpse into his own narrative and the paintings on display. “Don’t you see, I keep expecting the sky to be blue, but it’s always red. And they tell me of the same heartbreaks and betrayals, they tell me of the same dreams never realized, and they tell me of the same regrets. Only the details change, names, locations. It’s like the old song, one of them said, giving me finally some semblance of context, the song that goes, voy caminando, I go walking, y no se que hacer, and I don’t know what to do, ni el cielo me contesta, and the sky does not answer me. Mientras estoy dormiendo, while I am sleeping, I dream that the two of us together are heading toward a blue sky, but when I wake the sky is red, and you are gone.”
It is also a sample of what is to come at the February 26th reading and reception. Please join us for the reception and public reading by Maceo Montoya and the University of Notre Dame MFA Creative Writing Program students at the Notre Dame Center for Arts & Culture on February 26th from 6-8:00PM. The readings will begin at 6:30PM. Montoya will be reading from his book Letters to the Poet from His Brother, available from Copilot Press. Six Graduate Creative Writing students will read collaborative poems in pairs of two based upon Montoya’s works.
All works are on loan from the personal collection of Gilberto Cárdenas.
The Notre Dame Center for Arts & Culture is located at 1045 West Washington Street in South Bend.