Nchez
Cre Wallace
Contributed by Katarina Wong / In Zilia Snchezs retrospective currently on view at The Phillips Collection, a video shows her on the beach, casting one of her shaped paintings Soy Isla (I Am an Island) into the waves. This piece sets the tone for an exceptional exhibition from a fiercely independent artist. Born in Cuba in 1926, and continuing to work in Puerto Rico, Snchez makes drawings and paintings embedding the experience of being surrounded by the sea. Her work exudes the vulnerability as well as the power and resiliency that comes from of being self-reliant and self-contained. The show comprises more than 60 of her pieces, including the early intricate line drawings that she revisited throughout her career, sometimes incorporating them into flat paintings and later onto her sculptural canvases.
In the early work, Snchezs curiosity seemed boundless. She made a series of paintings thickly encrusted with dirt and paint around the same time she was making her flat paintings and drawings. In pieces like Tierra (The Earth), she incorporated the land under her feet into the painting itself.
In a documentary shown in the exhibition (and viewable on the Phillips Collection website), Snchez recalls the inspiration for this work. When her father was on his deathbed, she stepped out of his room to collect herself and saw a white sheet flapping against a protruding pipe. She noticed how a new shape emerged. The interview makes it clear that her memory of this moment is still tinged with sadness, but that it also caused her to think of her work differently.
Ive always considered that in the erotic there is a beauty, a sense, Snchez states in the documentary. The erotic is an undeniable current that runs through her work. She often incorporates pairs of shapes, which represent what she describes as equilibrium and unity. Sometimes they seem to clasp one another as in Lunar V (Moon V) or to merge into hidden slit-like spaces.
Snchez often references heroic women from history and transforms them into iconic forms. Troyanas (Trojan Women), a multiple-panel piece, calls to mind the waves that beat against the shores of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Greek isles. They can also be read as breasts or thorns that stick out sharply, daring to be touched. Like the waters that surround those islands, the shapes have the power to protect or inflict damage.
In a room tucked in the back, Snchezs only self-portrait hangs alongside work by her artistic influences. In this drawing, her nude body fills the frame in a runner-like pose. A wild mane of hair flows atop her head like a flame. Shes wedged between the background and the foreground, both covered in the tattoo markings seen in her later paintings. Despite the dynamic energy of the piece, her face is calm but intent, her eyes focused on the future. The drawing conveys the resilience that Snchez has drawn upon throughout her life, most poignantly in the last two years when Hurricane Irma bore down on her home and studio in San Juan.
Like the islands that shape her identity and work, Snchez has weathered storms and droughts, her work overlooked until recently. Still, Snchez remains fierce like her Troyanas, deeply rooted in her vision, and, like the islands she loves, she endures.
N1 - Funding Information:support for this work came from a Royal Society University Research Fellowship for PS-B. Discussions with Tony Prave have been very helpful. The comments of two anonymous reviewers, and of David Garbary, have significantly improved the paper. We thank Giorgio Bianchini for assistance with the graphics (Fig. 1). The University of Dundee is a registered Scottish charity, No. 015096.Fig. 1. Timing of the emergence of PSI, PSII and some cyanobacterial lineages. Molecular clock age estimates for PSI (Cardona 2018), PSII (Cardona et al. 2019), Gleobacter (Schirrmeister et al. 2015) and major clades and taxa (S?nchez-Baracaldo 2015; S?nchez-Baracaldo et al. 2017a, 2017b). The timing of the Great Oxidation Event (GOE; Bekker et al. 2004), the Lomagundi-Jatuli Excursion (Kump et al. 2011) and Neoproterozoic Oxidation Event (NOE; Och & Shields-Zhou 2012) are illustrated with vertical lines. Ancestral forms of PSII and PSI emerged in the early Archaean or early Proterozoic. D0 refers to an ancestral core subunit before the gene duplication that led to D1 and D2. The Cyanobacteria crown group inherited a heterodimeric photosystem II now shared by all oxygenic phototrophs. The majority of extant Cyanobacteria evolved after the GOE, and planktonic groups diversified towards the end of the Proterozoic and the Cretaceous periods. Cartoons are not drawn to scale. The dominant Cyanobacteria in the Precambrian were benthic, freshwater and marine, and some were terrestrial. Fig. 1 is modified from fig. 3 in S?nchez-Baracaldo & Cardona (2020) We dedicate this paper to the memory of Professor Mario Giordano: scholar, gentleman, colleague and friend.Publisher Copyright: 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Inaugurated to a five-year term in June 2014, President Salvador Sánchez Cerén, a former guerrilla commander of the FMLN, took office pledging to govern by the principles of austerity, efficiency, and transparency. Sánchez Cerén has adopted a more conciliatory attitude toward the opposition and the private sector than his predecessor, Mauricio Funes. Nevertheless, President Sánchez Cerén's approval ratings (50% in December 2016) have been lower than those of his predecessor, as security conditions remain dire and economic growth slowed in 2016.
The Sánchez Cerén government has maintained close cooperation with the United States that began under the Partnership for Growth (PFG) initiative (2011-2015), which was aimed at improving security and economic competitiveness. Congress has provided bilateral assistance, which totaled $67.9 million in FY2016, as well as regional security assistance through the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI). Economic cooperation has been bolstered by a $277 million Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) compact that began in 2014. Foreign assistance to El Salvador is being guided by the 2015 U.S. Strategy for Engagement in Central America, which prioritizes promoting economic prosperity, improving security, and strengthening governance. It remains to be seen how the Trump Administration may seek to adjust this strategy.
A small, densely populated Central American country that has deep historical, familial, and economic ties to the United States, El Salvador has long been a focus of congressional interest (see Figure 1 for a map and key data on the country).1 After a troubled history of authoritarian rule and a brutal civil war (1980-1992), El Salvador has made some strides over the past two decades in establishing a multiparty democracy.2 A peace accord negotiated in 1992 brought the war to an end and assimilated the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrilla movement into the political process as a political party. In 2009, Mauricio Funes, a former journalist, took office as head of the country's first FMLN government. After a razor-thin election, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, a former guerrilla commander, began his five-year term on June 1, 2014, at the helm of a second consecutive FMLN government.
Born in 1944 in rural Quezaltepeque, El Salvador, to a family of humble origin, Salvador Sánchez Cerén began his career as a teacher. He later transitioned from being a teacher's union leader to serving as a guerrilla commander for the Fuerzas Populares de Liberación, or FPL, during the war years. He was one of several FMLN leaders to sign the Peace Accords in 1992. Sánchez Cerén later served as a legislator from 2000 to 2008 before becoming Mauricio Funes's vice president and minister of education. Sánchez Cerén is generally regarded as more of a leftist than former President Funes and maintains close ties with Venezuela and Cuba.
During the 2014 campaign, Salvador Sánchez Cerén sought to broaden his appeal beyond the FMLN base by marketing himself as a "progressive" rather than as a hard-liner. He selected Oscar Ortiz, the popular former mayor of Santa Tecla, as his vice president. Together, they promised to keep the social programs that had been popular during the Funes government.
In March 2014, Sánchez Cerén narrowly defeated ARENA's candidate, Norman Quijano, in a runoff election. Sánchez Cerén captured 50.1% of the vote, whereas Quijano received 49.9%. Prior to taking office, Sánchez Cerén and Ortiz convened dialogues with different sectors of Salvadoran society, including ARENA and the private sector.
President Sánchez Cerén's cabinet includes several holdovers from the Funes government, including the ministers of the economy, foreign affairs, public works, and social inclusion. Although several of those ministers formed good working relationships with U.S. officials and participated in the Partnership for Growth (PFG) process, it remains to be seen how those relationships will continue under the Trump Administration. The Cabinet also includes Communist party officials and allies of Tony Saca, some of whom have had tense relationships with the United States. Some U.S. officials were dismayed by Sánchez Cerén's decision to maintain David Múnguía Payés, the architect of the ill-fated 2012 gang truce who is under investigation for allowing arms trafficking, as Minister of Defense.8 The rest of the security Cabinet, which was restructured in January 2016, is composed of police from the FMLN ranks who have worked well with U.S. counterparts.
During his inaugural address, President Sánchez Cerén outlined the goals of his government: (1) boosting growth and addressing the country's fiscal crisis through infrastructure projects and reforms to improve the business climate, (2) investing in education and health care, and (3) combatting crime and violence. Sánchez Cerén stressed the importance of working with the United States and promoting trade with Latin America, Asia, and Europe. In 2014, El Salvador joined Petrocaribe, an arrangement through which Venezuela has provided subsidized oil to Caribbean and Central American countries.9
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