Kitchen Debate
November – December, 2017
Rawson Projects and Regina Rex, New York, US
Artists:
Alejandro Almanza Pereda, Javier Barrios, Livia Corona Benjamin, Ana Bidart, Edgar Cobán, Debora Delmar, Cynthia Gutiérrez, Valentina Jager, Iván Krassoievitch, Enrique Lanz, Javier M. Rodríguez, Edgar Orlaineta, Chantal Peñalosa, Gabriel Rico, Marco Rountree, and Eduardo Sarabia
Site95, Rawson Projects, and Regina Rex are pleased to announce their collaboration for Kitchen Debate, a group show of Mexican artists curated by Paulina Ascencio.
The exhibition takes its name from the infamous series of conversations between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev during the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959; started in the kitchen of a suburban model house that, allegedly, anyone in America could afford. A showing off of domestic technology, the event was a watershed for consumerism culture in America, appealing to the increase of purchasing power of the average family, and the outcome of the beginning of modern credit.
The trail of these ideas spread to Mexico as an aspirational way of living for middle class families, portrayed in magazines, advertisement, and TV. Both the conversation and its aftermath are revisited almost sixty years later through the work of 17 Mexican artists. From a post-NAFTA conjuncture, from society that has become suspicious of the “American way”, this Kitchen Debate considers post-war design, social housing crises, states of emergency, millennial dynamics, and access and distribution of godos.
Press
Kitchen Debate curated by Paulina Ascencio - Rawson Projects
Kitchen Debate - Artguide/Artforum
Javier Barrios, Ana Bidart e Ivan Krassoievitch Kitchen Debate - SOMA