Andelareo Circus Tent Sculpture — Mexican Polychrome Folk Art

From the celebrated ceramics village of Santa Cruz de las Huertas, Jalisco — the same community that produced Candelario Medrano, whose work entered the Nelson Rockefeller Collections and the permanent collection of the International Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe — comes this monumental two-part circus tent sculpture by the named artist Andelareo. Hand-modeled in low-fired clay and painted in full carnival palette, the piece depicts a working Mexican circus (carpa) in obsessive detail: a striped dome tent in cobalt, cadmium red, chrome yellow, and grass green rises from a columned open-arcade base, every surface animated with wire-stem balloon clusters, painted pennants, and dozens of individually modeled figures. Performers, acrobats, musicians, a seated ringside figure, a gray elephant, and a black bear populate the interior; on the dome's exterior slope, additional figures including a semi-nude folk-art female and a black-clad attendant flank a towering black sombrero at the apex. The Santa Cruz de las Huertas tradition is documented as surrealist folk art at Harvard and Berkeley — this is that tradition at monumental scale.

At 20 inches tall and 30 pounds, this is exhibition-grade production. A handmade attribution label on the underside reads ANDELAREO SANTA HUERTA DE LA CRUZ, placing the artist and origin firmly within one of Mexico's most collected folk ceramics lineages.

CONDITION Good, with age-appropriate wear as shown. Colors remain bold and legible across the full surface; wire balloon armatures are intact and unkinked. Minor paint loss and surface abrasion are present at several high points on the dome exterior, with localized clay chipping along the base perimeter edge consistent with handling and age.

DIMENSIONS / SPECIFICATIONS

• Height: 20"
• Diameter: 19"
• Weight: Approx. 30 lbs
• Material: Hand-sculpted and painted low-fired clay
• Construction: Two-part lidded vessel — dome tent lid + open-arcade base
• Attribution label: ANDELAREO SANTA HUERTA DE LA CRUZ (applied to underside)
• Origin: Santa Cruz de las Huertas, Jalisco, Mexico
• Campbell's Soup Can (4" H) Shown for Scale