Videos, paintings, drawings and more are part of the second annual Resaca Exhibit at the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art. The exhibit is sponsored by the Public Utilities Board and intends to create awareness for the community about the importance of taking care of these important green areas as well as supporting local artists.
Deyanira Ramirez, executive director at the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, said it is an honor for the museum to be working again with BPUB for this exhibit.
“This resaca exhibit it’s our second yearly and it’s sponsored by Brownsville PUB. It is an honor for us to present this because this way we are creating awareness in the community about the importance of the resacas and its restoration,” Ramirez said.
“We are supporting the work PUB does and trying to collaborate with them to invite the community to respect and take care of our resacas, of our animals, the water and the green areas. They make our city beautiful and we want to reinforce the efforts BPUB is doing with their restoration project and for us, having artists expressing the same idea through art, we think we’ll make a greater impact.”
The exhibit will run until Nov. 28 and features more than art 50 pieces by artists Laurel Alvarez, Oscar Alvarez, Carole Boyd, Marilyn Brown, Vanessa Caraveo, Pu Chen, Ana De La Garza, Jay Elbert, Nohemi Espinoza, Eraldo Estrada, Dinah Faith-Huff, Andrea Garcia, Nellie Garcia, Albertina Gonzalez, Monica Gonzalez, Stephen Hawks, Tony Hudson, Roberto Lopez, Virginia Mendoza, Bobbete Morgan, Carlos Nunez, Carol Plumb, Armando Ramirez, Miguel Roberts, Francis Rodriguez, Renne Rodriguez, Frank Sauceda, Thelma Sullivan, Joselyn Torres, Isabel Valle, Amanda Vanderford and Nancy Vera.
Plumb, a local artist and board member of the museum, said she is very excited about the show and it’s important to raise awareness about the resacas in the area.
“There’s resacas all through the lower Rio Grande Valley and some of them are very small. We have to be careful because of filling in and lots of time developers we’ll fill them in but I think that through this show we are creating more awareness and people are starting to kind of treasure the resacas in Brownsville,” Plumb said.
Other artists got inspired by the resacas on their daily lives, such as Nellie Garcia, an artist who has a resaca on her backyard and finds inspiration on it. Garcia submitted acrylic pieces for the show of different resacas.
“I get a thrill watching the resaca, especially if it’s very smooth and the reflections that it has from the trees, or whatever is on the side. And when you see the resaca, and the water does not move, but you see the reflections moving, it’s so mesmerizing,” she said.
“I think we have to preserve and clean our resacas because it’s part of our community and it makes Brownsville more special. I think we do much better with the landscaping and making our resacas more attractive, so I think they are important for our community.”
Francis Rodriguez’s piece is like no other at the exhibit. With a video of herself dancing around a resaca playing on loop at the museum, she said hopes to inspire the community to place a focus on the relationship their body has with the resaca.
“The film is playing on loop here at the museum and I was very excited to involve dance in this exhibit because I think it places a focus on the relationship between our body and the resaca and that’s really important in restoring our relationship with the resaca so that we can bring out the best in each other,” she said.
Ana Maria De la Garza, a local artist who will soon open her art gallery in Brownsville, said she finds inspiration in her daily life to continue painting.
“My focus in art is the beauty of the art, the beauty of our daily life, what it is around us, that’s what I like to express more,” she said.
The Brownsville Public Utilities Board’s Resaca Restoration Project aims to restore our resaca systems to their original depths by dredging sediment, trash and other debris has built up over the years. This project will not only help water flow in these waterways, but it will also restore fauna and wildlife found in these unique ecosystems, the official website reads.
