TONY GLEATON Original Signed Photograph Costa Chica Mexico Afro-Mexican Portrait

Description: Stunningly intimate portrait by the late, acclaimed photographer Antony Gleaton (1948-2015). Subject: an Afro-Mexican grandmother and granddaughter Signed on backing board. Titled "Bajos, Mexico" with the small date "'83" Work is in very good condition. Backing board, mat, and frame with some wear. From the personal collection of a recently deceased friend of the late artist, Los Angeles, CA. Image size: 6 x 6 inches Framed size: 12 3/4 x 12 inches About the artist: Tony Gleaton was born in 1948 in Detroit, where he lived until his family moved to California in 1959. In 1967, at the age of 19, he joined the Marine Corps and subsequently completed a tour of duty in Vietnam. Returning to California after being discharged, he entered UCLA, became interested in photography, and eventually moved to New York, where he worked as a photographer's assistant and briefly considered a career as a fashion photographer. After only achieving moderate success, Gleaton tired of the fashion scene and, in 1981, traveled in the American West, doing odd jobs and photographing cowboys, focusing on Native Americans and blacks. Of this period, Gleaton has said: "That was the beginning of a whole new phase in my life and an awakening for me as a black American... Black and Native American cowboys don't fit the John Wayne image, so history and the mythic tales of the American West never included them." While at work on that series, he was introduced to the Mexican rodeo and began traveling to Mexico from Los Angeles. He shared an apartment with a stunt man from Churubusco Studios in Mexico City 1982 through 1988, Two years later Gleaton established a household with the Tarahumara Indians of northern Mexico. When he learned that small communities of blacks, descendants of the colonial slave trade, inhabited the Costa Chica region, he set out to find them. "When I got there, I found a people without a common mythology. Every village had a different tale of how their ancestors arrived in Mexico. I thought it was interesting that the early presence of blacks in the Americas was rarely discussed and largely undocumented." In 1990, he extended his work to include Central America, and in 1994, he began the South American series. Exhibitions of these series from Mexico, Central, and South America have traveled throughout the United States, Mexico, and Cuba. He is currently working on a series of landscape photographs entitled The Black Route West: Manifesting Destiny which combines imagery with text to chronicle the African Diaspora in territories west of the 96th meridian in the United States, the sovereign lands of Mexico, and the dominion of Canada between 1528 and 1918. (parts of this paragraph and the entire preceding paragraph are excerpted from Majorie L. Heath, "Tony Gleaton," Montgomery Gallery, Pomona College, 1997)

Price: 450 USD

Location: Van Nuys, California

End Time: 2025-02-05T22:01:55.000Z

Shipping Cost: 20 USD