At age 90, Mai Onno is still painting. The Estonian expat artist who first moved to San Miguel de Allende in 1957 can also still tell fascinating stories from her extraordinary life, one which began dramatically with her escape from Europe before developing into a successful career as one of Mexico’s leading artists.
Escaping from the Soviet Union after Stalin took over Estonia
In 1940, the Soviet Union annexed Estonia, along with Latvia and Lithuania, and in the process, murdered many members of the intelligentsia and anyone else who stood in the way. When the Nazis invaded in 1941, the situation only worsened. The Soviet Union reclaimed control over Estonia in 1944, after the fall of the Third Reich. Onno fled her homeland for Germany, living as a displaced person in a camp where she received her early education. During this time, Onno’s family splintered and her education was repeatedly disrupted, but she survived. Finally at age 14, with the help of two aunts she hardly knew, Onno was able to leave in 1948 “on the last boat left in the harbor,” as she describes it. She never saw most of her family members again.
Onno found refuge in Canada, where she discovered her passion and talent for art at the H.B. Beal Technical School in London, Ontario. In 1957, she earned a one-year scholarship to study under noted muralist James Pinto at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende. Although Onno could not have guessed at the time, this decision would lead to her spending most of the next seven decades in Mexico.
A life in the heyday of San Miguel de Allende’s international art scene
Recognizing Onno’s talent, the head of the Instituto Allende extended her scholarship for a second year, and then a third. There Onno met renowned German sculptor Lothar Kestenbaum. The two eventually married, and with the exception of two years in Rome on a fellowship and several years when Kestenbaum taught in Santa Barbara, California, and at the University of Wisconsin, they lived in San Miguel.
At the time of Onno’s arrival in 1957, San Miguel de Allende was a town of only 15,000 people. Yet it already had a thriving international art scene, thanks to the efforts of visionaries such as the Peruvian Felipe Cossío del Pomar, who founded the Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes in 1938, and American Stirling Dickinson, the first director of the school, who promoted it to expatriate artists, including American WWII veterans who studied for free under the GI Bill. Famed Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros was one of the generational talents who lectured at Bellas Artes, which produced some of the finest artists of the era.
Both Onno and Kestenbaum taught at Bellas Artes for many years themselves, before shifting to teaching private lessons out of their home studios. The couple, and later their son, David Kestenbaum, were influential in the San Miguel art scene for decades.
As Onno explained to M.B. Paul, author of “Conversations with Artists,” she has in some ways always felt displaced, ever since the initial ruptures of her childhood. “I have been displaced in so many ways, through the Second World War, losing my country, being shoveled into a detention camp in Germany, with great difficulty being allowed to immigrate into Canada, and then coming to Mexico where you can live a lifetime but still be a foreigner. I belong here and yet deep down I don’t belong here.”
But a powerful connection grew. “Over these many years,” she continued, “I have absorbed the influences of nature, the explosion of light as it hits the trees and flowers, the glow. What Mexico brought to me was the tremendous natural world, the sunlight, the plants, the landscapes, the enormous contrast between light and dark, the sun and shadow, the intense color; these have been my inspiration and my life here. I have absorbed it. It has become a part of me completely. So in this way, I belong.”
Onno credits San Miguel’s creative atmosphere and lower cost of living — at least in previous decades — with enabling her family to live their desired artistic life. “It made it possible for us both to pursue the creative life. We could live comfortably on a small income, the climate is good, and there were fellow artists close by, people of like minds with whom we could exchange ideas. Especially in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there was a nucleus of foreign artists who in turn attracted eccentrics, odd but brilliant people, so it was a wonderful milieu.”
Triumph and tragedy marked Onno’s seven-decade career in San Miguel de Allende
Onno emphasizes that she, her husband and eventually their talented son, who both sculpted like his father and painted like his mother, inspired each other and often exhibited their work together. “It was always the three of us, as equals. Oh, of course sometimes one or another was creating stronger work, but we didn’t let that bother us. We loved to exhibit together and let the pieces live in conversation with each other. We inevitably played off each other.”
Her husband was a larger-than-life figure whose work often garnered intense attention. “Mai reminds me of Leonora Carrington in the sense that she is a European artist who spent a lifetime in Mexico after World War II and despite producing work of incredible depth and quality found herself somewhat overshadowed by the men in her life,” noted Debra Broussard, Onno’s current gallery representative and friend. “Women’s art was often undervalued at that time.”
Onno’s work first earned public attention in the 1960s after one of her paintings won a competition judged by famed Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo.
Onno is best known for her abstract landscapes that emphasize distance and space, featuring organic forms and strong brushstrokes. As she explained, “Decades ago, as I started on my creative path, I had to find a world that belonged to me. I found it in nature, in the biomorphic forms, an inspired field of awesome beauty, power and intelligence. [While] my paintings have been labeled lyrical abstractions, they really are nature in all its diversity.”
Lothar Kestenbaum developed Parkinson’s disease in the 1980s and passed away in 1995. Sadly, their son, David Kestenbaum, known in particular for the iconic metal bull that stands at the entrance to the Instituto de Bellas Artes today, also died in 2013 at just 48 years old. When asked how she survived these losses and continued to celebrate beauty in her art, Onno replied simply that she had no choice. “You take in the pain,” she said, “you absorb it, and then you force yourself to keep going. There is no other option.”
Still exhibiting her work and that of her remarkable family
To learn more about the work of Mai Onno, Lothar Kestenbaum and David Kestenbaum, visit the website of the San Miguel Art Loft. To schedule a private viewing, contact Debra Broussard at [email protected].
Moreover, Onno encourages readers to dive in and explore the rich art scene that is currently thriving, just like Mai Onno herself, in San Miguel de Allende.
Based in San Miguel de Allende, Ann Marie Jackson is a writer and NGO leader who previously worked for the U.S. Department of State. Her award-winning novel “The Broken Hummingbird,” which is set in San Miguel de Allende, came out in October 2023. Ann Marie can be reached through her website, annmariejacksonauthor.com.
