Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files: Audio Art and Strange Poetry from the US/Mexico Border

Portrait of Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, courtesy of the artist.

A man sits upright at a table wearing a black hat, sunglasses, and an open black jacket with yellow shoulder pads exposing his chest with tattoos. A stack of white paper sits on the table along with a vase of flowers, an intricate ash tray with skulls, candles, and a plastic alien head labelled with the text “Alien Pops.” The room is red behind the seated figure, with artworks, photographs and carved items decorating the walls. A prominent neon sign that reads "La Nostalgia BAR” sits above the seated person.

Photo by Zen Cohen

Multilingual live radio and archival audio program presented as part of Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40

In a first-ever partnership, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Public Media Institute, and the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art present a year-long series of experimental audio performances from Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a performance artist, writer, activist, and MacArthur Fellow, class of 1991. The series is an initiative of Toward Common Cause, a multi-venue exhibition and program series organized by the Smart Museum to mark the 40th anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows program throughout 2021.

Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files: Audio Art & Strange Poetry from the US/Mexico Border offers multilingual live radio and archival audio programs addressing “the multiple pandemics of racism, sexism, xenophobia and neo-colonialism on steroids in the Trump Era.” Throughout his life, Gómez-Peña has worked in audio art and radio across multiple genres, from poetic journalism to Spanglish spoken word, and from radical storytelling to collaborations with musicians, poets, and activists. This ongoing series will present samples of his previous work (1980–2015) and newly recorded material created in the last two years and during lock-down.

Audiences in Chicago can tune in to Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files every other Wednesday at 6:30 pm (CT) at 105.5 FM WLPN-LP or stream on twitch.tv/lumpenradio.

Radio keynote

An Open Letter to the Museums of the Future
Wednesday, February 3, 2021, 6:30 pm (CT)

Guillermo Gómez-Peña has an obsession with rewriting and restaging so-called “Western Art History” while highlighting colonial legacies of systematic exclusion, demonization and fetishization of Brown, Black, and indigenous bodies. This radio keynote challenges contemporary art museum practices and calls for an open discussion regarding radical restructuring from within.

Watch Gómez-Peña’s open letter above and add your voice by e-mailing tomuseumsofthefuture@gmail.com or leaving a message at 773.823.9700. Submitted letters and voicemails may be read by Gómez-Peña on his bi-monthly experimental audio series on Lumpen Radio or be included in Jane Addams Hull-House Museum’s upcoming exhibition, public programs and in print. Letters should include preferred names that may be used on the radio.

Broadcast archive

Audiences in Chicago can tune in to Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files every other Wednesday at 6:30 pm (CT) on Lumpen Radio, 105.5 FM WLPN-LP.

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