Mexican village art colors their world

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Patricia Leigh Brown

Alan and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg with items from their folk art collection, including “El Festín del Nopal,” a papier-mâché cactus bedecked with skeletons playing instruments, by Ricardo Linares Garcia. Credit Philip Greenberg for The New York Times

CONNECTICUT---Like many residences in this woodsy land of Modernist architecture, the house Alan Goldberg designed in 1977 for his wife, Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, and their children was conceived as a serene, minimalist paradise. That was before they started negotiating rocky trails to remote Mexican villages in pursuit of ceramic mermaids, funeral processions made of corn husks, and other folk art. Their exuberant collection by 86 known artists quickly subsumed their once-pristine house. They began traveling to Mexico in the early 1960s when Zihuatanejo, in Guerrero state, was a sleepy fishing village “filled with characters out of a Humphrey Bogart movie,” Mr. Goldberg said. [link]