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Parallel Stories: Richard Rodriguez in Conversation
October 1, 2017 @ 2:30 am PDT
Timed to coincide with the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the far-reaching and ambitious consideration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles taking place across Southern California, noted author, essayist, and commentator Richard Rodriguez explores the color brown as a metaphor for mixture, and thus the key to our cosmopolitan societies where lives interact and borrow from one another.
Just as the great Mexican philosopher and essayist Octavio Paz once celebrated the dense, rich, layered complexity that is Mexican molé, opposing it to the American mania for clear gravy (American pot roast), Rodriguez embraces mixture as an essential part of the human experience.
“I write of brown, a color that is not a singular color, not a strict recipe, not an expected result…”
In his lyrical, resonant interweaving of family, food, religion, history, language, California, America, Mexico, we may find a new way of placing ourselves in the 21st century.
Free SBMA Members/$10 Non-Members/$6 Senior Non-Members
Reserve or purchase tickets at the Museum Visitor Services desks or online at tickets.sbma.net. Located at the Mary Craig Auditorium, Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1130 State Street, Santa Barbara).
More about Richard Rodriguez:
- Hailed in the Washington Post as “one of the most eloquent and probing public intellectuals in the country.” A master of the personal essay, Rodriguez writes about the intersection of his personal life with some of the most vexing public issues of our time.
- Award-winning author of Brown, Hunger of Memory, and Days of Obligation
- Days of Obligation was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction and he received the Frankel Award (later renamed “The National Humanities Medal), the highest honor the Federal government gives to recognize work done in the humanities.
- He received a George Peabody Award for his televised essays on American life.
- Brown was nominated for the National Book Critics Award.
- His latest book, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography considers the “desert religions” (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) in the aftermath of September 11, and asserts that women be seen as central to religion.
- His books are frequently used in “Community Reads” and “1st Year Reads” programs.