If you went to the opening-night reception for the art exhibition inspired by “The House on Mango Street,” Sandra Cisneros’ revered 1984 novel about coming of age in Chicago, you would have learned two things.
The first was that the National Museum of Mexican Art, putting on the art show, has organized a lively, widely varied and thoroughly engaging cross-cultural collection. Paintings, photographs, elaborate paper cutouts and even a tricked-out 1971 Schwinn bicycle echo the novel’s themes of community and belonging.
The second lesson was that Cisneros is, in the vernacular, a rock star.
Parking in the Pilsen neighborhood around the museum was nearly impossible to find on that recent Friday, and the line in front of the museum looked as bad as Disney World on a Spring Break day.
That wasn’t for the show, however; those wanting to see the art could slip right in. The throngs were there to meet Cisneros and have her sign, for the most part, copies of her most famous book, most of them looking very well-used.
“I have the most beautiful fans, the salt of the earth fans,” Cisneros said by phone this week from New York City, where she was speaking at a college. “My friend Blanca from third grade who I hadn’t seen since I was a child came up. A second cousin I had never met before.”
More than 1,000 people came through the line between 6 and 10:30 p.m., museum officials estimated. The author had a more visceral measurement. “My arm felt like it was going to come off my shoulder,” she said.
“Nobody complained. No one fainted,” she said. “They really wanted to tell me something. My readers are particular in that they have testimonies of such exceptional emotion. They will tell me stories like, ‘This is the first book I read in English.’ Or, ‘I was told I wasn’t going to do anything great in life by my counselor in middle school. I’m finishing UCLA right now.'”
Cisneros, 60, was so busy working that night, she said, she didn’t see more than a few of the pieces in the show, an unusual one for the museum because it includes more than just Mexican artists, even more than just Latino artists.
“It’s one of the handful of times we’ve invited artists of not strictly Mexican descent,” said the museum’s chief curator Cesareo Moreno, who also curated the show. “Sandra’s book is so universal.”
Cisneros was a poet before she was a novelist, and “Mango Street” delivers a series of stylized vignettes about the life and neighborhood of Esperanza Cordero, a girl of about 13 growing up in a disadvantaged Chicago neighborhood among people of Mexican and Puerto Rican ancestry.
Almost from publication, it has been widely taught, in school settings ranging from middle school to college and in English-as-a-second-language classes. Nearly 6 million copies have been sold in English, said Susan Bergholz, Cisneros’ literary and lecture agent.
“It’s a wonderful combination of poetry, prose, imagination, and it’s very appealing across the board,” said Bergholz, who has worked with the author for more than three decades. About Esperanza, Bergholz said, “we’ve always said, she’s our Tom Sawyer. She’s our Huck Finn. People talk about her that way.”
The opening room of the museum show includes copies of “Mango Street” in many languages, posters from theatrical versions of the novel, as well as photos of Cisneros and some of her artifacts. To prepare for her move to Mexico from her longtime home in San Antonio two years ago, the author said, she was paring down her possessions and asked Moreno if he wanted her old desk and typewriter, for instance.
Those items are now in the exhibition, in that “Mango”-centric first room. But after that, the show stops being so on the nose. It moves from being about the book to being inspired by the book, in dialogue with the book, opening up to ideas about life, work and family in mostly working-class neighborhoods, especially as seen by adolescents.
“We didn’t want it to be an illustration of the book, and it needed to stand on its own two legs,” said Moreno. The museum intends for the exhibit, with wall text in English and Spanish, to travel after it comes down in August.
The works have evocative names: “I See a Home in the Heart,” for a collage on handmade paper (and also a quote from the novel); “Remnants of Long-term Memory,” for a series of three dresses; “Sons of a Bad Life,” for a painting of young men on a Pilsen street; “Color(ed) Theory: Homage to an Englewood Block No. 1v.1,” for a project that sees the artist and friends paint in a bright color, mow the lawn for and generally perk up abandoned houses slated for demolition by Chicago.
Some of the works, such as Marcos Raya’s “Sons of a Bad Life,” are from the museum’s collection, but most came from a call Moreno put out for works on the “Mango Street” themes.
“The vast majority we didn’t find through galleries and curators, but through the artists themselves,” he said.
The great variety of media, which include lace curtains, a poster and an assemblage of found wood, was intentional, said Moreno. “I wanted the exhibit to be fun, to really grab the attention of young visitors,” he said. “With all the different mediums, it’s a very fun environment.”
For her part, the author found the idea of an art exhibit based on her book deeply moving.
“It’s astonishing and beautiful and especially meaningful because Chicago is my hometown,” Cisneros said. “There’s a kind of poetic grace and justice about it. I had such a difficult time in Chicago personally. I always was living on the fringes of beautiful Chicago, as a woman, as a poor person. But I benefited greatly from its assets, like its museums and its libraries. They changed my life.”
And there’s a full-circle aspect to the show, too, she said: “The purpose of my life was confirmed by a book I wrote when I was living two blocks away” from the museum, teaching at the nearby Latino Youth Alternative High School. “That book came at a time when my face was in the dust. I felt absolutely powerless to save my students’ lives. I was just so overwhelmed by the lives and problems and issues my students had. I would go home and cry.
“I took their stories and wove them into an autobiographical novel. The real story of ‘House on Mango Street’ is a powerless teacher in her 20s working at a school that doesn’t have money for chalk, thinking, Why is she teaching them literature? What good is literature?”
Through Aug. 23, National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St. Free; 312-738-1503 or nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
