Mexico City-based artists (and others) are creating coloring books you can download for free
Mexico City-based artists and others belonging to a small drawing group that is hosted each week by the arts entity Obrera Centro have begun publishing coloring books that can be downloaded for free. Volume 1 was released on March 25, 2020, and the 80-paged Volume 2 became available on April 3, 2020. Links to both below.
There is a small group of individuals in Mexico City, some artists, some self-identified as non-artists, who get together on Tuesdays to draw. Or, they did get together on Tuesdays until… you know. Like so many others in the past month, the 31 members of this group, members who call their group “El Dibuje” (a play on the verb “to draw” that translates roughly to “Draw!” in the imperative form) had to figure out what to become in a city whose politicians are increasingly insistent that they “Quédate en casa.”
They chose to start creating coloring books.
El Dibuje is intentionally shape-shifting, committed to evolving continually, and so it seemed culturally befitting when discussions about meeting virtually to recreate live meet-ups failed to inspire consensus. The group is a project (does getting together to draw count as a “project”?) of the entity Obrera Centro (is OC an “entity”? How quickly language fails when an organization strives to defy categorization). Here is how journalist for El Universal, Sonia Sierra, described Obrera Centro at the end of 2017:
Obrera Centro is far from being a cultural center in the traditional sense. To define it, [founders Mauro Giaconi and Marcos Castro] use words like androgenous space, self-direction or self-management, flexible, nomadic, multi-use, interdisciplinary, and anti-hierarchical (source, trans. Pankonien).
Polysemous like its host, El Dibuje is not a class. Except sometimes, when guest artists show up to lecture and then lead exercises. Or except when regular participants choose to prepare and lead a class with a theme of their own choosing. Most of the time, however, participants in the group show up to decide, together, whether they will free draw or group draw, use their dominant or non-dominant hands, draw from the wrist or from the body, sit on the roof or in the industrial kitchen of the once-abandoned elementary school in Mexico City’s Escandón neighborhood where Obrera Centro is temporarily based. Other days are all about observation and quick sketching at the local market, or visual critique in and around the quickly gentrifying neighborhood, or whatever else those present agree merits trying.
Three Sundays ago, on March 20th, group participant and visual artist Alvaro Verduzco pitched yet another exercise to group members. Posting the above picture to the sticker-riddled, art-works-in-progress-heavy, active-daily El Dibuje Whatsapp chat, he typed: “I want to create a series of drawings for people to print and color in their houses. Do you like the idea? Yay or nay?”
Accustomed to the organic and intentionally under-planned, perhaps, it took five days for los dibujes (what those who show up to El Dibuje have taken to calling themselves) to complete their first volume of “Dibujes para Colorear.” One week later, El Dibuje regulars and, this time, invited artists created a second volume — a massive tome with 80 pages of black and white drawings by 79 different Mexico City artists (and again, non-artists, too) that anyone with a printer or a tablet can now color.
These two works took form beneath the guidance and organizational skills of artists Mauro Giaconi and Marcos Castro (who together founded Obrera Centro as well as El Dibuje). And you can access both for free as PDFs here:
When asked if the coloring books are part of an ongoing project, Giaconi answered with what seems an especially accurate answer for many things in this moment in which we now find ourselves: “Quién sabe?” (who knows?). Just in case: if another coloring book does come into being, Obrera Centro will be promoting that work, no doubt, via its social media platforms. Until then, enjoy the above, and cuidense mucho, mucho.
Additional coverage
- Local (March 25, 2020; online arts and culture magazine)
- GobCDMX (March 27, 2020; via Twitter, Mexico City political officials declared Friday, March 27, “Stay home and color Friday” w a link to El Dibuje’s first coloring book)
- TimeOut Mexico (April 7, 2020; bilingual arts and culture magazine w the largest readership in Mexico City)
- Maple Magazine (April 12, 2020; Mexico City-based fashion magazine)
- Claudia Sheinbaum (April 21, 2020; via Twitter, “mayor” of Mexico City links to “Dibujes para Colorear 2,” thanking CDMX artists for creating works to keep families entertained at home.)
- Air de Paris (April 23, 2020; Paris-based arts gallery with a “today’s news” blog)
- Promotion and circulation by numerous Mexico-based as well as Argentina-based artists, arts galleries, and arts cooperatives + collectives… (details upon request)
Transparency
The author is a participant in the free and open to the public El Dibuje drawing group at the center of this article, and she is frequently an attendee at events hosted by Obrera Centro, the arts entity that created and houses El Dibuje. Pankonien does not receive any money at any time for these relationships.
