#fotoseptiembre #fotoseptiembre2024 #30years #jennylouisagiuffrida #agostobiancocuellar #kristelortadelapuente #digitaldragdialogues #augustine #puenteparalagente #bluestarartscomplex #firstfriday #photographyfestival #photographyexhibit #festivaldefotografia #muestrafotografica #sanantonio #austin #texashillcountry #online #texas

JENNY LOUISA GIUFFRIDA, AGOSTO BIANCO CUELLAR (San Antonio, TX)
Digital Drag Dialogues 95/24
Curated by Dr. Puente Para La Gente
Augustine Annex
Blue Star Arts Complex
1414 South Alamo #106, San Antonio, TX 78210
(210) 391-8463 | kapuentephotography@gmail.com

With over 25 years in fashion and art, Agosto Cuellar is the 2018 San Antonio Fashion Awards Cultural Pioneer Award, and Women’s Wear Designer of the Year 2021 recipient, who got his start as a local vintage store owner at Jive Refried. Featured in Elle Magazine in 2005, he showcased some of his original fur work which inspired him to continue his repurposed and sustainable fashion designs before pop culture made sustainability a buzzword. Tim Gunn (Project Runway) called him a “Wild Card” for his designs in New York. Cuellar is the proud founder and producer of Runway En La Calle, a project that ran for 10 years and pioneered the 50′ outdoor runway experience in the West Side streets of San Antonio, Texas. This project featured up-and-coming talent that would otherwise not have a platform for exposure, and allowed established designers to showcase their work in a unique event that pushed the boundaries of culture and art. In 2019, his collection was showcased in New York’s and Paris’ Fashion Weeks, with a homecoming in San Antonio at Fashion Week SATX™. He currently operates Augustine The Shops at Blue Star, one of the city’s most popular locations for sustainable fashion and in 2021 launched his label under the same name Augustine.

Jenny Louisa Giuffrida received a Bachelor of Art degree in Art, focusing on Photography, with a minor in Art History, from The University of the Incarnate Word, in May of 2005. Giuffrida also studied art at San Antonio College and UTSA. She is a native of San Antonio, who has been studying art in the community since childhood at the Southwest School of Art SMD, Guadalupe Cultural Art Center, and privately with local artists. 

Dr. Kristel Orta-Puente is a professional photographer, rasquache artist, and community historian who works as a scholar-activist to build bridges between those who produce knowledge and the community that is the source of that sacred knowledge. ​​As a self-expressed Rasquache scholar, they define this title as being unfettered and unrestrained, to favor the complex over the simple, the misunderstood over the conventionally understood and to embrace contradictions in thought and being. It is the space where low and high art can meet. Puente began their artist’s journey as a local photographer then pursued an Associate in Photography at San Antonio College as a non-traditional/first-gen student and has gone on to pursue graduate studies. Puente’s area of interest is San Antonio history and the documentation of cultural bearers and San Antonio artists. Their artistic influences include film, intersectional feminism, gender studies, activism, Borderlands, fashion, and Rasquachismo. 

A little blue house in San Antonio’s Lavaca district, across from Victoria Courts, was a sanctuary for art, lovingly named Planta Mixteca Cultural House. This was the home of artist Agosto Cuellar and was a center for creativity for not only himself but for local community youth. In this space, was where Drag Dialogues was created in 1995 by Cuellar and photographer Jenny Louisa Giuffrida. Collaborating artists Beatle on this project included in this performance/installation were Beatle (Mary) Carroll and Fernando Perez who openly challenged society’s perceptions of queer identity while pushing their own personal boundaries of what expressions of drag can mean captured by Giuffrida on 35mm film. 

Cuellar, in Drag Dialogues 95 is exhibiting topics and interests that as an artist he revisits in hybrid expressions throughout his career. Using his sensibilities as a rasquache artist he takes simple items and transforms them into art, adornments, and installations. As he evolved into a fashion designer over the years, his rasquache practice has finally been understood to the public successfully as sustainable fashion. As a designer, in his Runway in La Calle’s 2016 collection San Antokyo he revisits many of the original concepts he expressed 20 years earlier in Drag Dialogues, always pushing the boundaries of gender and conventional fashion design before main stream trends. In Drag Dialogues 2024 we revisit the 35mm photographic prints by Giuffrida that were shown in 1995 and have added new digital prints scanned from the original negatives that offer on a larger scale an appreciation of the brilliant original works. 

•••

•••

•••

•••

•••

•••

•••

•••

•••

•••