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Drake University's 1971 
Iberamerican Celebration 

The Iberamerican Celebration at Drake University grew out of the appreciation of Iberamerican cultures and the desire to improve interhemispheric understanding. By inviting authors, artists and speakers to come to Drake and by presenting numerous conferences conducted by leading scholars, the Celebration attempts to contribute new knowledge, new insights, as well as to create a growing appreciation of Iberamerican cultures.

Drake University's Iberamerican Celebration was instituted in 1969-70 with the English premiere of Three One Act Plays by the Mexican writer, Carlos Solórzano. This year the Celebration is presenting a combination of music and art. The Des Moines Symphony Orchestra under Dr. Willis Page is featuring an Iberamerican program with the Cuban classical guitarist, Juan Mercadal. The sculpture of the Mexican artist, Feliciano Bejar, and the paintings of the Argentinian, Jiame Davidovich, will be on exhibit at the Cowles Library. All three artists will be present at Drake University during the Celebration. 

The Celebration is the coordinated effort of the Liberal Arts and Fine Arts Colleges.

Feliciano Bejar 

Feliciano Bejar was born in 1920 in Jiquilpan in the state of Michoacan, Mexico. He began to paint at the age of eight while paralyzed by polio, learning his basic knowledge of artists' materials from an Indian woman of the village, Maria Cervantes, who taught him to mix colours, prepare canvas, make cut-paper designs, ceramic, papier-mache and other folk arts. Partially recovered from his paralysis, he went for a short time to the Salesian College in Guadalajara until the government's religious policy closed the school, thus terminating Bejar's brief formal education.

Apart from Maria Cervantes, the only artist Bejar knew when young was Jose Clemente Orozco who was working on his murals in the Gabino Ortiz Library of Jiquilpan. The rest of his artistic education came from his personal experimenting with a multitude of materials and his observations of painting, sculpture and architecture during his extensive journeys in the Americas and Europe. 

Since his first one-man exhibition (New York 1948), Feliciano Bejar has had sixty-nine exhibitions of painting and sculpture in Mexico, United States, France, England, Norway, Poland, Austria, and Belgium. He has also participated in more than one hundred major collective exhibitions.

[[image - photograph of Feliciano Bejar]]

MAGISCOPES: THEIR EVOLUTION

Feliciano Bejar made his first visit to Europe in 1949 and 1950 with a UNESCO scholarship to travel and paint. During his travels he spent some time working in the glass factories of Murano, Italy. Later, in 1958, he began experimenting with the production of stained glass windows (without lead dividers) for the buildings on the small Mexico City estate he has constructed. Concurrently he was working on sculptures of soldered metals. In 1962 he began to combine these techniques and incorporated glass into his metal sculptures. Finally in 1964 he began to experiment with the use of lenses among the metal and glass. The first satisfactory piece, produced early in 1965, was The Universe. In this first Magiscope Bejar used bought lenses. Since then he has learned techniques and evolved others of his own for grinding and annealing lenses in crystal and plastic.

On the occasion of their first presentation (March 1966 in the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City) Feliciano Bejar said: "I aim at producing structures of strong forceful lines to capture and house a world of visions and poetry. My Magiscopes have the quality of optical instruments, both fantastic like Kaleidoscopes and scientific like telescopes. Some distort, others define, but always they give a new vision. As their generic name implies, they are "viewers of magic", viewers of the magic and poetry that is all around us in everyday life but that our lazy eyes do not want to see."