Maneuvering Mestizaje.

• Author: Conaway, Janelle

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Jamex and Einar de la Torre have long been drawn to the ancient art of glassblowing "You get to play with fire," Einar explains. But the artists are not much interested in just producing "eye candy."

"It's so easy to make extremely beautiful objects," Jamex says dismissively. The real challenge, he adds, is to make the medium expressive, to use it to say something about the human condition. And so, over the years the two brothers have become increasingly inventive artistic collaborators, often integrating blown glass into witty mixed-media pieces that explore issues of identity, popular culture, religion, history, social justice, and politics.

Their birth country, Mexico, provides a mother lode of images and themes, but these are often just the starting point. Take their pyramidal shrine called Baja Kali. Topped by an ornate glass sculpture of the Hindu goddess Kali giving birth--the title is also a playful nod to Baja California, Mexico--the piece incorporates glittery Day-of-the-Dead skulls, fake fur, and vehicle running lights to evoke the elaborately decorated buses once common on Mexican highways. ("That's slowly disappearing, because the buses are more corporate and less the personal shrine of the driver," Einar notes.)

The Aztec calendar stone, Maya glyphs, giant Olmec heads, and the towering statues of Tula are just some of the archaeological icons that recur in de la Torres' works. "They're part of the modern construct of being Mexican," Jamex says. "We're celebrating these objects that make us different from everyone--different from Spain."

A current exhibition of their collaborative efforts--called Meso-Americhanics (Maneuvering Mestizaje): de la Torte Brothers and Border Baroque--will be at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, until August 16. Tey Marianna Nunn, the center's chief curator and director of the visual arts program, says that since the show opened in September, many visitors have come back a second or third time to take in the pieces' visual complexity and layered meanings.

A longtime admirer of the de la Torres' work, Nunn says it defies easy categorization, as it spans US contemporary art, Mexican arte popular, and broader global trends, while staying true to the artists' own distinctive voices. "That's an extraordinary feat," she says.

Jamex and Einar de la Torre, who have dual Mexican-US citizenship, live and work on both sides of the border with studios in San...