Though it seems that she never lived at Lake Chapala, fiber artist Jeanine Cappel, a regular visitor to Guadalajara, was familiar with the lake from at least as early as the mid-1960s, and exhibited in Ajijic in the late 1980s.
Jeannine Cappel (née Lange) was born in Chicago on 29 January 1929, and died in Fort Worth, Texas, on 8 April 2013.
Jeanine Cappel studied furniture design at the Pratt Institute in New York, which is where she met her husband, Texan Howard Edward Cappel (1924-2005), whom she married in 1953.
The couple lived in Fort Worth, Texas, and had two children: daughter Toby and son Peter (who predeceased his mother). The couple visited Guadalajara in January 1966 to celebrate their 13th wedding anniversary. Not long afterwards, Cappel, who was a gourmet and master bridge player, began taking flying lessons.
In Fort Worth, the children were still toddlers when she began to work as a designer and decorator, working initially for the Acme Blind & Screen Co. and then Contemporary Interiors. She and her husband, an architect and World War 2 veteran, worked together in 1964 on the sets for the show “Critic’s Choice,” presented at the Community Theater, with one review praising the “tight apartment set by Howard and Jeannine Cappel that gives the illusion of five rooms.”
The following year, Cappel was awarded a Texas Wesleyan College award for her prints and collages. In 1990, Cappel held an exhibit at the Rock House Gallery in Fort Worth.
The two artworks shown below are each about 14.25 x 12.00 inches in size. “Crochet pieces have been applied and enhanced with pastel acrylic colors with an ever-so-slight hint of sparkle.”
Jeannine Cappel. Textile art. This Jeanine Cappel fiber art on canvas from the 1980s was/is for sale via her daughter’s online webpage.
Cappel was also an art teacher. In 1968, she was assigned to teach at Meadowbrook Junior High public school in Fort Worth, and was later on the faculty at Nolan High School for many years.
Jeannine Cappel. Textile art. This Jeanine Cappel fiber art on canvas from the 1980s was/is for sale via her daughter’s online webpage.
At Lake Chapala, Cappel exhibited examples of her fiber art in November 1988 at Galería de Zaida, then located in the Hotel Real de Chapala in La Floresta. The following January, she exhibited 20 pieces of fiber art with the same gallery after it had relocated to Ajijic to the intersection of Constitución and Marcos Castellanos.
Acknowledgment
- My sincere thanks to Toby Coppel for confirming some details of her mother’s life, and for permission to reproduce the images used in this profile.
Sources
- Fort Worth Star-Telegram: 6 Apr 1958; 9 Nov 1958; 17 May 1964; 20 May 1965; 19 Jan 1966; 25 Aug 1968; 6 Dec 1968; 26 Aug 1990; 23 Feb 2003; 14 Apr 2013.
- El Ojo del Lago: Dec 1988; January 1989.
Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.
Tony Burton’s books include “Lake Chapala: A Postcard History” (2022), “Foreign Footprints in Ajijic” (2022), “If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants” (2020), (available in translation as “Si Las Paredes Hablaran”), “Mexican Kaleidoscope” (2016), and “Lake Chapala Through the Ages” (2008).