Talented artist Beth Avary painted Ajijic early in her career

 1970s  2 Responses »
Mar 192025
 

Mary Elizabeth “Beth” Avary was just beginning her career as a visual artist when she moved to Ajijic in late 1970 with her husband, Don, and their three young children. The family lived there for a year before returning to the US.

Born to Edward George Schaefer and his wife, Mildred, in Indianapolis on 14 April 1941, Beth Avary began to paint as a child. She took a summer program at the University of Kansas (1957), before beginning her formal art studies at Northwestern University (1959-1960). Then, after summer classes at the Chicago Art Institute (1960), Avary completed her studies at the California College of the Arts (1961-1965), graduating with a BFA with honors. She also took a summer program at the University of California Berkeley (1962).

Beth Avary. 1971. Untitled. Courtesy of Kimi Avary.

Beth Avary. 1971. Untitled. Courtesy of Kimi Avary.

Avary’s work was influenced not only by her appreciation and knowledge of different artistic styles, but also by travel, which included spells living in France, Thailand, Japan (her first solo exhibition was at the Miramastu Gallery in Tokyo in 1967) and Mexico.

She first met her future husband, Air Force pilot Donald Davis Avary, while working on a troop flight bound for Vietnam. The couple settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they raised their three children. Don retired from the Air Force in early 1969 and accepted a position with Western Airlines. The children were still toddlers when he was furloughed a year later, so the family decided to spend some time in Mexico. A relative living in Guadalajara suggested they try Ajijic. The village home they rented was at Donato Guerra #4.

Among the friends they made in Ajijic were painters Peter and Eunice Huf, and lawyer-poet Ira Nottonson and his wife, Sandra Burton. When Peter Huf and fellow artist John K. Peterson organized a Fiesta de Arte—originally called the “First Lakeside Artists Fair—in May 1971, Beth Avary helped (as did Donald Hogan who was murdered a few months later).

Beth Avary. 1971. Ajijic.

Beth Avary. 1971. Ajijic. Courtesy of Kimi Avary.

The event was held at Calle 16 de Septiembre #33, in Ajijic, the private residence of Mr and Mrs E. D. Windham, and this is the only recorded exhibition in which Beth Avary participated in Mexico.

The other participating artists were Daphne Aluta; Mario Aluta; Charles Blodgett; Antonio Cárdenas; Alan Davoll; Alice de Boton; Robert de Boton; Tom Faloon; John Frost; Fernando García; Dorothy Goldner; Burt Hawley; Michael Heinichen; Peter Huf; Eunice (Hunt) Huf; Lona Isoard; John Maybra Kilpatrick; Gail Michael (Michel); Bert Miller; Robert Neathery; John K. Peterson; Stuart Phillips; Hudson Rose; Mary Rose; Jesús Santana; Walt Shou; Frances Showalter; ‘Sloane’; Eleanor Smart; Robert Snodgrass; and Agustín Velarde.

Peter Huf became a long-time admirer of her work. When I first questioned him about the various artists living in Ajijic when he was there in the early 1970s, Beth Avary was one of the first names he mentioned: “Beth was a very lyrical artist and had a psychedelic touch in a fine, feminine way.”

Over the course of her career, Avary explored several different genres of art. Her time in Ajijic helped her develop her own style, a celebration of landscapes that she termed naturalistic expressionism.

While living in Ajijic, she also wrote and illustrated Pablito Grows Up, a children’s story set in the village. The family returned to the U.S. when Don Avary was recalled by Western Airlines.

Beth Avary. Book illustration.

Beth Avary. 1971. Cover of Pablito Grows Up.

In addition to the show at the Miramastu Gallery in Tokyo (1967), Avary’s other major solo shows included Gallery 707, Los Angeles (1974); Institute of Noetic Sciences, Novato, California (1987-1988); Who’s Who In Art, Monterey, California (1999); Atelier Gallery, Santa Cruz, California (2000); and Schacknow Museum, Plantation, Florida (2006).

Beth Avary. Book illustration.

Beth Avary. 1971. Book illustration.

Avary’s works have also been shown in dozens of major invitational and juried shows at museums, galleries, conventions and festivals in the US, Mexico, Spain, Japan and Russia.

Beth Avary died on 4 May 2008. Two months later, examples of her work were exhibited at the Center for Integrated Systems, in Stanford, California, in a show which included works by three other artists: her son, Arthur (known for his digital art which “explores patterns and repetition in artwork throughout history”), Corina del Carmel and Diana Leone.

Aside: Beth and Don Avary were visited in Ajijic by Don’s brother Ned and his wife, Brigitte, and their young Manitoba-born son Roger Avary. Roger Avary is an accomplished Canadian-American film director, screenwriter and producer, who won a joint Oscar with Quentin Tarantino for their screenplay of Pulp Fiction (1994).

Acknowledgments

  • My sincere thanks to Don Avary and Kimi Avary Fallon for sharing their memories of their time in Ajijic with me.
Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.
Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the artistic community in Ajijic.

Sources

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

The literary and artistic connections of the Mi México building in Ajijic

 1970s, 1980s, 1990s onwards  2 Responses »
Feb 192025
 

There are not many genuinely old buildings left in Ajijic. Most of those that survived into the 1970s have since been modified or remodeled beyond recognition. One exception is the building at Morelos #8, one block back from the pier, which housed (until mid-February 2025) the store Mi México. It is a rare survivor, largely unchanged for the past 80 years or more.

Mi Mexico, 1982. Photo courtesy of Alejandro Wagner

Mi Mexico, 1982. Photo courtesy of Alejandro Wagner

I don’t know for sure who built it or precisely how old the building actually is. But I do know—based on my research into the influence of foreigners at Lake Chapala—that this building was acquired in 1937 as a vacation home by U.S. entrepreneur Louis E. Stephens, then living in Mexico City. Stephens had first learned about the delights of living in Mexico—and of Ajijic in particular—from screenplay writer Charles Kaufman, who had lived in the village in 1929. Kaufman’s novel Fiesta in Manhattan (1939), which tells the story of a young village musician and his wife who are encouraged to leave their lives at Lake Chapala for the bright lights of Manhattan, is actually dedicated by its author to the people of Ajijic.

Stephens and his then-wife Annette Margolis (later known as Annette Nancarrow, artist and assistant to José Clemente Orozco) were exceptionally well-connected. They were members of the literary, artistic and cultural elite of Mexico City, and often offered the use of their Ajijic property to friends.

The most significant of these friends (from our narrow perspective) was U.S. fashion designer Helen Beth Kirtland, whose husband was a noted Mexico City rare books dealer. When Kirtland decided to separate from her husband, Stephens offered her and her three young children the use of his Ajijic home.

Mi Mexico, 1996. Photo courtesy of Alejandro Wagner

Mi Mexico, 1996. Photo courtesy of Alejandro Wagner

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Their first visit in 1946 was for only a short time, but a year later Kirtland moved to Ajijic permanently with her children and never looked back. She founded Telares Ajijic (Ajijic Hand Looms), employed weavers and, through enterprise, good fortune and hard work, built up a highly successful business. She also opened her own store, Mi México. Her children all grew up in the village.

After completing college in California, her daughter, Katie Goodridge Ingram, born in Mexico City in 1938, returned to Ajijic and ran the Galería del Lago from 1975 until it closed in 1977. Ingram then opened her own gallery as part of Mi México, which she ran from 1978 to 1983. Ingram, an award-winning poet, later wrote an absorbing and beautifully written memoir of her childhood in Mexico City and Ajijic—According to Soledad, memories of a Mexican childhood—which garnered rave reviews following its publication in 2020.

Many other famous artists and authors have vacationed in or visited the Mi México building over the years. They include Algerian-born painter Violette Mège and her award-winning artist husband, Michael Baxte, in the 1940s. And, because of Kirtland, German poet Gustav Regler lived and wrote here in the late 1940s, and Erik Erikson (Young Man Luther) did so in the 1950s. Helen Kirtland’s tocaya and good friend Helen O’Gorman (wife of architect-artist Juan O’Gorman) visited more than once.

Mi Mexico, 2024. Photo courtesy of Alejandro Wagner

Mi Mexico, 2024. Photo courtesy of Alejandro Wagner

Kirtland later married American sculptor Mort Carl, who deserves the credit for building Ajijic’s first tennis court in an empty lot immediately behind the Mi México building. Carl’s work became better known after he abandoned Kirtland and Ajijic to return to the U.S. And, much more recently, I’m reliably informed that novelist Edgar Taylor Morris lived at Mi México while writing All the Clouds’ll roll away.

Mi México has now relocated to Riberas del Pilar, but this Ajijic landmark’s historical, literary and artistic heritage deserve to be recognized for many years to come. The building’s owners want to sell. Any ‘renovation’ would need prior approval from the Chapala municipality, which has apparently promised to preserve the facade. Will local authorities step up when needed to ensure its future? Only time will tell.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Writer and sculptor Mort Carl lived in Ajijic in the 1940s and 1950s

 1940s, 1950s  2 Responses »
Nov 152018
 

The charismatic writer and artist Mort Carl, no doubt wearing his accustomed bandana tied in front of his neck, first arrived in Ajijic in the mid-1940s. Not long afterwards he married Helen Kirtland Goodridge; together they established the first weaving business in Ajijic, an enterprise that became known as Telares Ajijic.

Mortimer R. Carl was born into a Jewish family in Cleveland, Ohio, on 26 June 1905. His father, Benjamin Edward Carl (1877-1930), had been born in Ohio and (in 1910) owned or managed a brass company. Mort Carl’s mother, Minnie Rosenblum (1884-1965) had been born in Austro-Hungary and taken by her family to the U.S. as an infant.

The family was presumably fairly well-off since Mort and his mother spent the summer of 1908 in the country. Mort’s brother Norman was born in about 1915.

At the time of the 1930 census, taken only weeks after his father died, Mort, working as an instructor in a gymnasium, was still living with his mother and brother. Two years later, Carl married Theresa (“Terry”) Roth in New York City.

Little is known about Mort’s early life as a writer and artist except that he spent time in Woodstock, New York. He started his creative career as an artist and then tried his hand at writing, before rededicating himself to painting and sculpture.

Even though Carl was a writer, I have identified only one single work by him: Natural Man, copyrighted in the “Dramatic Composition and Motion Pictures” category on 14 March 1941. Prior to visiting Mexico, his artwork had apparently been shown in several exhibits in the U.S., though the only one I have so far confirmed was the 26th Annual Show of Woodstock Art Gallery in August 1945, which included his painting entitled Ballerina.

When Carl first arrived in Ajijic in 1946, he initially stayed, like so many before him, at the small lakeside inn belonging to the Heuer siblings. This is also when he met Helen Kirtland for the first time. (The following year, Kirtland and her three young children moved to Ajijic from Mexico City, after the break-down of her relationship with the children’s father, Ezra Read Goodridge, a dealer in rare books.)

When Mort Carl returned to Woodstock in September 1947 for several months, the local newspaper reported that he had “been in Mexico for the past year, where he was working on a book.”

It is probably his next trip to Mexico that was recounted to me so vividly by Helen Kirtland’s daughter Katie Goodridge Ingram, then a young girl. Ingram recalls that Carl drove down to Ajijic in a “giant black Packard”, “stayed at the Heuers where he said the mattresses were filled with softballs,” and often invited her mother to dine at the Heuers. Ingram and her two siblings were also invited, but ate in a separate room for children; the food was simple, but she still remembers the healthy, hearty soups and the pastry desserts.

Carl Mort. ca 1981. Antiphon.

Mort Carl. Antiphon. c 1981 (installed Chester Public Library. NJ, 1983).

Carl had arrived in Ajijic with a “full-on passion to be the next great novelist, the next great discovery in painting, and passionate to play tennis [and] to teach boxing.” After marrying Helen Kirtland in about 1949, Carl set up his art studio in the family home (today the Mi México store) but continued to rent a “small two-room house with a patio and kitchen area” as a writing studio a couple of blocks away, at the intersection of Calle Constitución and Ramón Corona. From about 1950 to 1952, that building was the always-hopping Club Alacrán (Scorpion Club), run by adventurous Black American artist Ernest Alexander and his Canadian partner Dorothy (“Dolly”) Whelan.

Ingram, who ran an art gallery in Ajijic in the 1970s, saw a lot of Carl’s paintings and says that many of the canvases he completed in Mexico, “had broad, dense strokes that screamed for more real estate,” but that. later, after divorcing Helen Kirtland, remarrying and moving to New Jersey, “he did large murals for banks and other commercial entities and so began to flex into the right kind of space.” Carl also became known for sculptures and “so-called monumental art.”

Soon after their marriage, Kirtland and Carl saw an opportunity to start a weaving business. Kirtland (who had changed her name to Helen Carl) had studied fashion and worked as a dress designer in New York prior to moving to Mexico. She provided the creative genius behind the project. The Carls found some small dusty handlooms sitting in a forgotten corner of the Posada Ajijic and bought them from the inn’s owner, Josefina Ramirez. Helen Carl tracked down José Mercado, the man who had originally made and operated the looms, and persuaded him to move from Guadalajara to Ajijic, teach the art of weaving and make them some much larger looms, suitable for dresses, tablecloths and “yardage”.

The weaving business quickly became a success story, so much so that poor imitations of several of Helen’s original designs are still being made in Ajijic today!

The Carls paid a brief visit to Woodstock in 1952 so that Mort Carl, who was said to be considering returning to live in Woodstock at some point, could “make a survey on weaving in this village.”

By 1955, the looms in Ajijic were sufficiently well-known to be included as a side-trip from Guadalajara: “For handloomed fabrics you can drive to quaint little Ajijic (Ahheehic) on the edge of Lake Chapala, pick your own cloth from the looms of Helen and Mort Carl and then drive on to Jocotepec for the best selection of handwoven serapes in Western Mexico…” The quote comes from a travel article written by Bob Lamont (later the long-time editor of the Lloyd’s Mexico Economic Report and founding president of ARETUR, the Association of Tourism Writers and Editors) and his wife Margaret.

Carl Mort in 1955 (Credit: El Informador)

Carl Mort in 1955 (Credit: El Informador)

Coincidentally, 1955 was also the year when Mort Carl held an exhibition of his latest artwork in Guadalajara. The two-week exhibit of twenty modernist abstracts opened at the Instituto Cultural Mexicano-Norteamericano de Jalisco (Galeana 158, Guadalajara) on 20 October. The works had such uninspiring names as “Construcción en negro y blanco”, “Construcción vertical” and “Composición en color.” The artist was quoted as claiming that his paintings needed to be seen and felt, not understood. Carl had previously held a show of his paintings at Galeria San Angel (Dr. Galvez #23) in Mexico City, which opened on 17 March 1954.

Besides his writing and his art, Mort Carl was also an active sportsman, enjoying golf and tennis. In the late 1940s, he even built his own clay court (possibly the earliest such court at Lake Chapala) on a lot rented for the purpose behind the family home. The white lines for the court were made by Helen Kirtland out of bleached canvas and stapled (later nailed) in; they were “re-colored with whitewash every week.” The net was an old fishing net, complete with weights, bought from a local fisherman and adapted for its new purpose with the addition of a double-stitched canvas band, precisely in line with the sport’s official regulations “as per Encyclopaedia Brittanica.” Carl hosted regular tennis parties to which he invited friends from Guadalajara.

Unfortunately, life in Ajijic was not all a bed of roses for Mort and Helen Carl. For all his artistic sensitivity, Mort Carl was prone to violent outbursts, sometimes threatening even those he held nearest and dearest. The couple remained together until about 1960 when Mort left Ajijic and moved to Mexico City, where he set up a similar hand-loom weaving business.

After his attempts at reconciliation with Helen proved futile, Carl was undergoing treatment for elbow bursitis in a local hospital when he met a woman who had just given birth. Instantly smitten, he allegedly told her that if she sent her child to an orphanage for adoption, he would marry her and take her to the States: she did, he did and they did. Mort Carl and his new wife lived for some time in San Francisco before settling in Chester, New Jersey.

Paintings by Mort Carl were exhibited alongside woodblocks by Blance Small at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery in San Francisco from February to May 1973.

In New Jersey, Carl became a moderately successful artist, specializing in large metal sculptures. The example in the image, which comes from the Smithsonian Art Inventories Catalog, is entitled Antiphon. The 2-meter high sculpture was acquired and installed in 1983 by Chester Public Library in New Jersey.

Mort Carl died in New Jersey in November 1985 and left his body to Columbia University Medical Center.

Acknowledgment

My heartfelt thanks to Katie Goodridge Ingram for sharing her personal knowledge and memories of Mort Carl, and to Sally Brander, Local History Librarian at Chester Public Library, NJ, for pinpointing the date of installation of Antiphon.

Sources

  • El Informador: 19 October 1955, 7; 20 October 1955; 22 October 1955.
  • Katie Goodridge Ingram. 2011. “Helen Kirtland Goodridge”, chapter in Alexandra Bateman and Nancy Bollenbach (compilers). 2011. Ajijic: 500 years of adventurers. Mexico: Thomas Paine Chapter NSDAR, 91-100.
  • The Jewish Independent: 29 April 1932, 2.
  • Kingston Daily Freeman (Kingston, New York): 12 September 1947; 8 October 1952, p 15
  • Bob Lamont and Margaret Lamont. 1955. “Guadalajara One Of Picturesque Places In New World”, Phoenix Arizona Republic, 3 April 1955, 65.
  • Oakland Tribune, 25 Feb 1973, 128.
  • Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian Art Inventories Catalog.

Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.

Ajijic in the Old Days: Zara Alexeyewa, aka La Rusa

 1920s and earlier, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s  10 Responses »
Feb 152018
 

Newcomers to the village of Ajijic will not necessarily have heard of Zara Alexeyewa, (known popularly as “La Rusa” – “The Russian”), one of the village’s most distinguished long-term foreign residents, and one still remembered affectionately by the entire community, Mexican and non-Mexican. Everyone who knew her has their favorite anecdote about this iron-willed lady who would gallop her horse through the narrow streets, hooves clattering on the cobblestones, cloak billowing in the wind.

When La Nueva Posada opened in 1990, its dining room was named “La Rusa” in honor of Zara, who had passed away the previous year at the age of 92. Zara’s incomparable contribution to Ajijic life over more than sixty years was focused on the welfare of children and the conservation of Lake Chapala.

Zara Alexeyewa Khyva St. Albans (her formal name in Mexico) lived out a very full and dramatic life – from the moment she set foot on the stage on Broadway as a teenager, until her eventual death in Ajijic in 1989. Objectivity was not, however, always one of her strong points, and piecing together the truth behind the legend can be difficult. In her enthralling autobiographical book, Quilocho and the Dancing Stars, which certainly contains fiction alongside fact, Zara weaves some wonderful tales about her ballet career interspersed with an account of the life of a Mexican friend and supporter, Enrique Retolaza, who (according to the book) had been the youngest officer of Pancho Villa.

In reality, Zara was no more Russian than most native New Yorkers, having been born in that city in 1896. After making an early impression as an actress on the New York stage, twice being featured on the cover of the Dramatic Mirror, and playing lead roles in several Shakespearean productions (as Juliet, Portia, and Ophelia among others), she decided, in the wake of the Great War, to go to Europe. She had attended dancing classes from age six, and in Europe she began a new career as a ballerina. She performed her own ballet, “The Red Terror”, based on a poem by Leonid Andreyev, with a musical arrangement which had been worked on by her mother, organist Charlotte Welles.

"Khyva St. Albans". White Studios. 1915.

“Khyva St. Albans”. White Studios. 1915.

While in Europe, Zara met a young Danish dancer, Holger Mehnen, and the two remained inseparable dancing partners until his untimely death in Guadalajara in 1944. Zara and Holger gave numerous performances of “The Red Terror” around the world, playing to packed houses in Europe, South America, the U.S., and in Mexico.

In 1926-27, they were engaged by the Philadelphia Opera Company as directors of ballet, and presented an unusual Egyptian ballet, called AIDA. They also choreographed and performed “The Black Swan and the White Lilly”.

While contemporary newspaper accounts speak of “the two geniuses of Dance of the ex-Court of Russia”, “dancers of the imperial court of Nicolas II and of King Constantine of Greece”, and the like, it is probable that the nearest either dancer got to those places was Budapest in Hungary, where they gave one of their many standing-room-only performances.

They first performed in the Degollado Theatre in Guadalajara in January 1925, by which time they had decided to take a prolonged vacation at Lake Chapala, living initially at the Villa Reynera in Chapala. In about 1940, they moved to Ajijic.

Degollado Theater program, 1936.

Zara and Holger. Degollado Theater program, 1936.

Zara seems always to have had the knack of leaving indelible first impressions on people she met.

The American artist Everett Gee Jackson, who resided in Chapala for several years in the 1920s, in Burros and Paintbrushes, his entertaining account of his time in Mexico wrote that, when he and his friend Lowelito first arrived in Chapala, they “did not see any other Americans. The two Russians who lived in the house with the bats were the only other non-Mexicans in the village, as far as we knew.” These two “Russians” were, of course, Zara and Holger.

Not long afterwards, Jackson had a much closer encounter with Zara:

“I set up my easel… because the place was… mysterious and magical… with the lazy hogs asleep in the shadows. I was lost in what I was doing, but, suddenly, to my surprise, all the hogs began to shuffle to their feet and move off the road… grunting ferociously. Then I heard a sound like thunder behind me. But it was not thunder. It was that Russian woman riding at full gallop on a dark horse, and she was coming right at me. She knocked my easel over but missed me… She never slowed down but kept galloping at full speed down the road.”

Another of Ajijic’s marvelous characters, Iona Kupiec, who lived for decades in the village, also remembered her first meeting with Zara. Iona was staying in the Posada Ajijic in 1962, having only just arrived in the village. The next morning, she met Zara:

“While I was standing there entranced with the loveliness of everything, what should I see suddenly appearing in front of me from around a bend in the road but a beautiful woman wearing a big red velvet, gold-embroidered charro sombrero with a red, satin, high-necked Russian blouse with a gold dragon embroidered on it from the belt up to the collar, black culottes, with red leather boots, riding a black satin horse which reared up on its hind legs when she suddenly tightened the reins. I was stunned!”

Iona agreed to rent a cottage from Zara. In order to sign the contract, she followed Zara (still on her horse) “through more than a thousand square feet of garden, with glorious eucalyptus trees standing like stately monarchs, countless other fruit and flowering trees, and vast blooms from all kinds of bushes and shrubs – so much color and beauty, and even cool perfumed air!”

Zara’s house was full of mementos from her theater and ballet days, full length oils portraying her and her “brother,” Holger, in their dancing costumes, gilded-framed portraits from her New York theater appearances, photographs, figurines, books, “a veritable art museum in one, very large, elegantly furnished, parlor”.

Zara’s energies were undiminished as she approached her eighties and she insisted on reviving her ballet career for several performances, including a memorable farewell show in the Degollado Theatre in Guadalajara.

She also continued to ride daily until well into her eighties, and was a popular and much-loved figure as, astride her horse, she rode through the streets of Ajijic. This remarkable woman, perhaps the only person ever to reach stardom as an actress under one name (Khyva St. Albans) and as a dancer under another (Ayenara Zara Alexeyewa) is one of the more extraordinary characters ever to have lived in Ajijic.

Notes

A much more detailed account of Zara’s life can be found in chapters 4, 5, 22, 33 and 44 of my Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village (2022).

This post is a lightly edited version of my article about Zara, originally published in The Chapala Riviera Guide in 1990. It is no coincidence that a photo of the Villa Reynera, where Zara first stayed in 1924, appears on the front cover of my Lake Chapala through the Ages, an anthology of travelers’ tales.

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Acknowledgment:

This article could never have been written (back in 1990) without the help of long-time Ajijic residents Laura Bateman and Iona Kupiec, both of whom have since passed on to a higher world.