On July 16, 1969, Abel Quezada, Pedro Ferriz, and Miguel Alemán-Velasco and 38 North American Space Agency (NASA)-accredited Mexican journalists were in Cape Kennedy covering the launch of the Apollo 11 space shuttle from the press box. From the Houston Space Control Center Jacobo Zabludovsky carried out live feeds with Miguel Alemán-Velasco via Mexican national television channels 2 and 4, while in Mexico, Mario Moreno (Cantinflas) made an exclusive appearance on Mexican independent television.

De la Tierra a la Luna (From the Earth to the Moon) explores the development of the coverage and the reactions the news on the first man who stepped on the Moon caused. It also reveals the way in which reactions in the print media and radio became the reflection of the television coverage. The importance of this event – unprecedented in the history of communication – also exerted an influence on advertising and national and international cinema, as well as the thematic direction of visual work by the Mexican masters at the end of the 1960s.

The exhibition begins with a timetable drawn on the wall that explains how Mexican artists, poets, and literati imagined the Moon before humans actually set foot on it for the first time. The walk through the exhibit is articulated through the figures of Jacobo Zabludovsky, Miguel Alemán, Abel Quezada, Rufino Tamayo, and the different roles they played, as well as their motivations for covering the astronomical discoveries during the end of the 1960s. Aware that artists could offer a perspective and sensitivity that no camera would ever be capable of rendering, NASA from the beginning installed a visitors program to its facilities and invited artists such as Rufino Tamayo, Marcel Duchamp, and Roberto Matta.

Mexico’s participation was also an important part of the space race: it involved the launching of the first Mexican satellites, the installation of the Empalme-Guaymas station (in Sonora) to monitor space flights, and the Simplified Two-color System (SBS, its acronym in Spanish) utilized by NASA and invented by Mexican engineer Guillermo González-Camarena.

The exhibition presents twenty artworks by artists such as David Alfaro-Siqueiros, Pedro Coronel, Rafael Coronel, Rufino Tamayo, Cordelia Urueta, Lilia Carrillo, Enrique Echeverría, Roger Von Gunten, Gunther Gerszo, Pedro Friedeberg, Luis Ortiz-Monasterio, and Gabriel Kuri, among others, works deriving from several public and private collections. Also included are some of Abel Quezada’s cartoons and personal photographs taken on the day of the Apollo 11 launch in Cape Kennedy and during the re-broadcast of the landing on June 20, 1969, at his home in Mexico.

This project is the result of rigorous research work and professional and inter-institutional collaborations with the El Universal newspaper, Fundación Televisa, INHERM, Telecom-Telégrafos, and the Fonoteca Nacional. Thanks to their support the exhibition also includes a selection of videos, documents, magazines, and periodicals that attest to the importance of this event in Mexico.

As part as the activities running concurrently with the exhibit, a round table, also entitled De la Tierra a la Luna, will take place at MACG’s 3G auditorium on November 5 at 7:30 p.m.  Héctor Orozco, Miguel Ángel Fernández, Angélica García, and Gerardo Sifuentes – the researchers involved in the Project – will analyze in detail each of the discoveries that inspired this exhibition.

ENJOY THE SLIDESHOW OF THE EXHIBITION

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