The Bedford’s next Cocktails & Conversation brings together artist Inocencio Jiménez Chino and anthropologist Jonathan Amith for an intimate discussion about Chino’s decades long career. Presented alongside the artist’s debut retrospective at the Bedford, Aztec Stories in Modern Mexico, the conversation will illuminate the deep connections between Nahuatl storytelling, cultural preservation, and daily life in the Balsas River Valley in Guerrero, Mexico. Enjoy libations and light bites from Montesacro throughout the evening.

Get your tickets early, space is limited!
Ages 21 and up.

New this season: Cocktails & Conversation Bundle
Save on the Bedford’s popular Cocktails & Conversation series by purchasing a package! Held once per exhibition (4 total per season), Cocktails & Conversation is a lively gathering that offers personal insight into each exhibition from a leading expert. Sip cocktails (or mocktails) and enjoy delicious bites from Walnut Creek’s popular Italian eatery Montesacro as you gain an insider's perspective about the works currently on view. Package holders save $5 per ticket ($20 total) when buying a bundle and will have access to reserving space before the general public. Package holders can choose to use all four tickets for one event or spread them out over the season.

Bundle (4 tickets): $100

BUY A BUNDLE

Individual event tickets: GA $30 / Donor $15
Tickets for this event will be available in March 2026

About the Speakers: 

Inocencio Jiménez Chino is a self-taught artist from the Nahuatl (Aztec)-speaking village of San Agustín Oapan in Guerrero, Mexico. For over five decades, he has honed his painting practice focusing on daily life in his community and Nahua rituals and traditions. Jiménez Chino’s work has been exhibited at Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum (Chicago), Parque La Villette (Paris), and Catalyst Contemporary (Baltimore), the site of his first solo exhibition in the US. The books The Amate Tradition: Innovation and Dissent in Mexican Art and Uncle Rabbit and the Wax Doll feature his work. 

Jonathan D. Amith (PhD Yale, Anthropology, 2000) is an independent scholar who, since 2000, has worked closely with native speakers to extensively research and document a dozen Indigenous languages of Mexico. His primary focus, however, has been on distinct Nahuatl languages from the states of Guerrero, Veracruz, Puebla, and Hidalgo. Most particularly, he has documented (> 200 hours of transcribed audio), studied and become fluent in the Nahuatl spoken in San Agustín Oapan, where he maintains a house near that of Inocencio Jiménez Chino. Apart from his role in editing Uncle Rabbit, Amith’s work with this community includes an award-winning documentary, Silvestre Pantaleón (2011), whose protagonist narrated Uncle Rabbit and the Wax Doll; an exhibition and catalogue to protest the planned construction of a devastating hydroelectric damn (The Amate Tradition: Innovation and Dissent in Mexican Art [1995]), and an anthology (book and 6 CDs) of Nahuatl from the Balsas River Valley (Ok nemi totlahtōl [2009]). Amith’s work has not only been linguistic and anthropological, but multidisciplinary. He has led projects on ethnobotany and ethnoentomology, produced and co-directed numerous short documentaries (https://www.youtube.com/@jonathanamith1573), and worked closely with computational linguistics on automatic speech recognition and natural language processing.  

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