Floating Grafts, 2017-2018

Cynthia Gutiérrez detected the prevalence of stained-glass windows in Santa María’s older buildings. Among those is the building of the El Pensador Mexicano public elementary school. The artist approached the school community and proposed that it create a design that could be translated into a stained-glass work to be installed in the school.

Gutiérrez worked with Claudia Hernández, the owner of a small stained-glass workshop in the neighborhood, on the design of educative practices to work with groups of schoolchildren. Over the course of a year, the group carried out exercises about identity, memory, belonging, and language, thus developing a series of abstract forms that shaped the codification of a common language, only understandable to the members of the group. With this language they created a design in which they integrated the narration of their most important experiences in the school space.

The stained glass was installed in a window that measured thirty square meters, in a common area of the school. As a way of closing the project, the children and the artist shared the process of creating the window with the rest of the students. Over one week, they carried out educational exercises in which all the students could imagine their own stained-glass pieces.

—Josefa Ortega

Curators: Osvaldo Sánchez and Josefa Ortega
Final Project: Thirty-square-meter stained-glass window installed in the El Pensador Mexicano elementary school.