GRUPO SOAP DEL CORAZON was founded in 2000 by Xavier Tavera and Douglas Padilla to celebrate Latino artists and culture and the Latinization of Lake Street in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. In that show each artist addressed, visually, the questions: What is “soap of the heart? What cleans the heart?”
A year later the group went on to create a major exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s
Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program, “Frontera Lake Street”, which showcased the works of six local Latino artists. A highly attended exhibit, “Frontera Lake Street”, generated both publicity and critical acclaim. And it brought color and passion, politics and spirit to the Minnesota art world. In 2002, Grupo Soap created a Dia de los Mu***os (Day of the Dead) exhibition and celebration, “Un Dia con los Mu***os en Lake Street“. The exhibit focused on nine 8’x12’ murals on the Lake Street side of the empty Minneapolis Sears building, an ofrenda for the dead nearby, performance/ritual by local Aztec dancers, and a party/celebration at alternative Latino institution ArTrujillo Gallery/Studios. For Dia de los Mu***os 2003, Grupo Soap spotlighted the 370 plus disappeared and murdered women of Juarez, Mexico, with an exhibit and installation, “Ni Una Mas” (“Not One More”). It again added performance, music and food to the show, which took place at Mira Gallery/El Instituto de Cultura y Educación at El Colegio in south Minneapolis. In 2004, the artists of Grupo Soap del Corazón joined forces with Highpoint Center for Printmaking to create a workshop on silk-screening and an exhibition, “Gráfica Politica”, that exhibited both Minneapolis and Chicago artists. The prints made in “Gráfica Politica” were later entered in a community wide group show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, entitled “The Art of Democracy”. In 2005, Grupo Soap mounted two exhibitions in Valparaiso, Chile. The first show, “El Otro Americano” (“The Other American”), took place at El Instituto Chileno Norteamericano de Cultura and described the Latino–American experience. The second show, “Politica Ex-Carcel”, took place at Centro Cultural Ex-Carcel, a former prison under the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. In that exhibit, Grupo Soap del Corazón artists joined the long history of Latino political artists by stenciling / photographing posters on the walls of neighborhoods and barrios in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Valparaiso, Chile. In 2006 Grupo Soap del Corazón created “Artsourcing, An International Consortium of Outsourcing Artists” at The Soap Factory in Minneapolis. In that exhibit Grupo Soap, by publicly outsourcing the labor for all the individual projects, confronted issues of globalization and capitalism as they pertain to Latin America and the United States. By highlighting the work of those that actually do the manufacturing, Grupo Soap brought a measure of honor, recognition and profit to the almost 100 workers, from Tijuana, Mexico, to West Saint Paul, Minnesota, that participated. Then, in the fall of 2006, Grupo Soap del Corazon joined with ArtOrg, a Northfield, Minnesota based arts non-profit, to create “Northfield Dia de los Mu***os”, celebration that joined together the resident anglo community of this college town with recent Mexican immigrant factory workers. The event evolved around a 104’ banner printed with a steamroller on 4’x8’ woodblock prints created with Day of the Dead themes by a group of 14 latino artists from Northfield and the Twin Cities. Finally, Grupo Soap mounted an exhibition, "Nuestra Frida", in response to a major Frida Kahlo show at the Walker Art Center here in Minneapolis. Done in conjunction with Art Jones Gallery, the show featured the work of 14 artists and addressed Frida from myriad directions, political, devotional, pop cultural, deconstructionist - all to a major response from the Twin Cities community. In it’s eleven year existence Grupo Soap del Corazón has stayed true to it’s purpose: to encourage and exhibit “Soap del Corazón”, art that cleans the heart. It has showcased the work of 40 artists. Well over 100,000 people have seen its art. It has pulled the people of Minneapolis – St. Paul and Minnesota into deeper community.
