Sylvia Orozco Executive Director, Mexic-Arte Museum

Story by Julie Tereshchuk

Courtesy of Mary J. Andrade, Chris Caselli, Linda Genet, Diana Jauregui and Sylvia Orozco

Artistry Abounds at Mexic-Arte

Her life’s mission is to show the past, be involved in the present and shape the future. And she’s been advocating her dream with passion for the past 24 years. Now that her vision is a reality, what’s next for this icon of Austin’s art scene, who has enriched the arts landscape while gaining the respect and admiration of the entire community? By 1993 her marriage was over and she took sole custody of the canvas on which her life’s vision has been drawn. But let’s start with the blank canvas. In 1984, three artists signed the incorporation papers for Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin. Sam Coronado had already had his fill of nonprofits, leaving a young husband-and wife team to continue the ambitious project which had united them since graduate school.

Then, in 1993, Pio Pulido and Sylvia Orozco divorced. Since then, Orozco has been painstakingly crafting the masterpiece which has become the official Mexican and Mexican American Fine Art Museum of Texas; the official sister museum to the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Studio Museum, Mexico City; and a signatory to a treaty with the government of Mexico through the National Council on Arts and Culture. In recognition of her work, Orozco has received many honors, including one of Mexico’s highest, the Ohtli Award, in 2007. And with the increasing diversity of our community, the significance of her personal vision grows. As Mexic-Arte board chair Maria Luisa “Lulu” Flores says, “Art helps build bridges among people of different cultures.”

Orozco has always been a gatherer collecting rocks, leaves, insects while growing up in Cuero, TX; later books, photographs and recordings of artwork, lectures and exhibits as a graduate student in Mexico. And these days, as executive director of a unique museum, she gathers people: for boards, for fundraisers and simply for community. Because it is ultimately the delivery of art to the people which drives this 53-year-old Mexican American. “If I’m able, with the help of many people, to create a place where these things can be maintained, preserved, continue to multiply, and we can continue to use them to teach that’s success. Because objects in themselves are not enough. You [must] use them to teach.” Slight of frame (she claims five feet four inches but we’re skeptical), reserved in demeanor, nonetheless she is one tough negotiator. Orozco is persistent, direct and never afraid to ask for what she wants. That showed in 2001, when she bartered with the City of Austin. Fifty years of annual exhibits for underserved teenagers were exchanged for the price of the museum’s building on Congress Avenue a huge coup in a town with no publicly funded art museums.

She learned to be proud of her Mexican heritage, the value of education, and the importance of community from her mother, who although born in Mexico in 1918, was raised in the Texas valley. Unusual for her time, Aurora Estrada Orozco graduated high school. She went on to raise six children on a shoestring and all went on to college. “Our mother has been the central figure in the lives of all of us,” says Cynthia Orozco, Sylvia’s youngest sister. “She is very unassuming which is why Sylvia is so understated. We were taught not to be egotistical or to toot our own horn.” Mrs. Orozco was also a civic leader, who taught all her children to be community builders.

Growing up in small town Cuero, population 7,000 and home to turkey farms and a county courthouse, where football and barbecue were the main entertainment, Orozco learned to make something from almost nothing in a household on a tight budget. She also learned she had a talent for and love of art, winning her first art contest in second grade. The prize? Circus tickets. Sadly, the family didn’t have the money to run a car at the time so the tickets went unused.

Thus, from this tightly knit family atmosphere began her passion for her cultural roots. Excelling at art in high school, in 1973, Orozco went on to art studies at the local college, Texas A&M in Kingsville. Within two years she was headed to Austin. There the landscape changed dramatically. At UT Orozco was a minority and gravitated towards the student groups that were becoming increasingly active as the Chicano political movement burgeoned.

Always a diligent student, she was frustrated by the type of art instruction she received in Austin. “They weren’t doing any social realism,” she recalls. While her friends read Marx and were assigned weighty reading lists, she sometimes felt she was wasting her time. “We would do abstract drawings for three hours I wanted substance. I wanted to learn.” Then she got a job as a photographer with the Chicano newspaper, Para la Gente. From that connection came the opportunity to apply for a scholarship to study in Mexico City. So it was, after graduating with a BFA from UT, in 1978, Orozco headed to graduate school at the National School of Visual Arts, Mexico City’s venerable art institute known as the Academy of San Carlos. Some of the country’s great painters attended the art school, including Diego Rivera, who went on to become its director.