The Santuario de Jesús Nazareno de Atotonilco
	The Charco del Ingenio Botanical Garden and Natural Area
	Return to the Index for Our Mexico Trip

One of the stops on our guided tour of San Miguel (arranged by Greg with the same company that provided our transportation from Leon Airport to San Miguel) was the Galería Atotonilco Folk Art Gallery northwest of the city.

Our tour guide took us first to the observation area you saw on an earlier page, where we could see almost all of San Miguel. He then followed a major highway to the northwest to the area where we would visit the gallery, the Church of the Nazarene in Atotonilco itself, and stop at La Gruta hot springs. On the trip up to the gallery, he had an opportunity to tell us a bit about it.

The gallery is located five miles north of San Miguel de Allende on eight acres with ancient mesquite trees and frontage on the Rio Laja. Mayer Shacter, himself a ceramic artist whose career flourished for twenty-seven years before he gradually let go of it in favor of dealing in fine antiques and then vintage mid-century modern furniture and decorative arts, and his wife, writer Susan Page, found the neglected property in 2001, including two abandoned warehouses that had been a factory for rattan furniture.

They engaged landscape architect Tim Wachter and celebrated architects Steven and Cathi House to transform the property and buildings into a spectacular home and gallery, which have now been featured in two books and a magazine. The unusual architecture has been variously dubbed "contemporary organic" or "modern baroque." It is definitely unconventional, a style all its own.

Mayer Shacter’s career as a ceramic artist spanned twenty-seven years, from 1961 to 1988 when he worked in studios in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was featured in over a dozen one-man exhibitions, and his work is in many private and public collections including the collections of John Huston, Ella Fitzgerald, The Everson Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and the City of San Francisco. Articles and reviews of his work have appeared in the New York Times, American Ceramics, American Craft magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, to name a few, and he is the subject of two major "Portfolio" features in Ceramics Monthly.

In 1988, when his wife Susan Page sold her first book, Mayer took a break to accompany her on her book tour. He did not plan to abandon ceramics, but as he began to focus more on his interest in antiques, the excitement of buying, restoring, and selling period furniture took over, and he never returned to his potter’s wheel.

After seven years in an exclusive antique collective in San Mateo, Mayer began to concentrate on vintage mid-century modern furniture and decorative arts and in 1999, opened his own store in Oakland, called Think Modern.

Mayer and Susan had been working with and supporting Mexico’s Huichol Center for Cultural Survival and Traditional Arts since they met the director, Susana Valadez, in 1981. In 2001, two of the Valadez teenagers came to live with them in Berkeley so they could attend high school in the States. For all those years, they were building an unusual collection of Mexican folk art. Also, Mayer spent nine months traveling in Mexico and South America when he was nineteen.

All these connections with Mexico surfaced with a passion when Mayer and Susan found property near San Miguel de Allende that they could develop. They made the commitment to a new adventure in their lives and moved to Mexico in 2003.

Their passion for Mexican folk art, and Mayer’s zeal for buying and selling made the gallery a natural project for them. It opened in October of 2006. Mayer and Susan travel all over Mexico in their pursuit of undiscovered artists whose work deserves support. "One of the great pleasures of this gallery," says Mayer, "is my ability to support talented artists and their families, and to help keep alive one of the richest traditions of indigenous art anywhere on the planet."

It was this indigenous and folk art that we have come to the gallery to see, and our guide gave us plenty of time to wander through the gallery having a look.

Click on the Image Above to View the Slideshow

Fred and I wandered through the gallery, admiring the huge variety of folk art, and taking pictures of whatever we found colorful, interesting, or humorous. Of course, we didn't photograph everything, but I think the selection of pictures we did take are representative of what you'll find if you visit the gallery yourself. Indeed, there were so many pictures that a slideshow is the only reasonable way to let you look at them easily.

To view the slideshow, just click on the image at left and I will open the slideshow in a new window. In the slideshow, you can use the little arrows in the lower corners of each image to move from one to the next, and the index numbers in the upper left of each image will tell you where you are in the series. When you are finished looking at the pictures, just close the popup window.

When we were done wandering through the gallery itself, we headed back outside to walk around the grounds for a bit before we headed off to our next stop. Mohamed got a good picture of me in one of the artistic chairs, and I returned the favor.

We piled back into the SUV and headed off to the actual town of Atotonilco and the Santuario de Jesús Nazareno de Atotonilco.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	The Santuario de Jesús Nazareno de Atotonilco
	The Charco del Ingenio Botanical Garden and Natural Area
	Return to the Index for Our Mexico Trip