Mural Art in Mexico & US

A year of weekly interviews (1949-1950) with artist Diego Rivera by poet Alfredo Cardona-Peña disclose Rivera's iconoclastic views of life and the art world of that time.

This book explores how street art has been used as a tool of resistance to express opposition to political systems and social issues around the world. Aesthetic devices such as murals, tags, posters, street performances and caricatures are discussed in terms of how they are employed to occupy urban spaces and present alternative visions of social reality.

Chicanismo, the idea of what it means to be Chicano, was born in the 1970s, when grassroots activists, academics, and artists joined forces in the civil rights movimiento that spread new ideas about Mexican American history and identity. The community murals those artists painted in the barrios of East Los Angeles were a powerful part of that cultural vitality, and these artworks have been an important feature of LA culture ever since. This book offers detailed analyses of individual East LA murals, sets them in social context, and explains how they were produced.

A public art movement initiated by the postrevolutionary state, Mexican muralism has long been admired for its depictions of popular struggle and social justice. Mary K. Coffey revises traditional accounts of Mexican muralism by describing how a radical art movement was transformed into official culture, ultimately becoming a tool of state propaganda. Analyzing the incorporation of mural art into Mexico's most important public museums--the Palace of Fine Arts, the National History Museum, and the National Anthropology Museum--Coffey illuminates the institutionalization of muralism and the political and aesthetic issues it raised.

Between 1932 and 1934, José Clemente Orozco painted the twenty-four-panel mural cycle entitled The Epic of American Civilization in Dartmouth College's Baker-Berry Library. An artifact of Orozco's migration from Mexico to the United States, the Epic represents a turning point in his career, standing as the only fresco in which he explores both US-American and Mexican narratives of national history, progress, and identity.

The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican traces the evolution of cultural relations between the United States and Mexico from 1920 to 1935, identifying the individuals, institutions, and themes that made up this fascinating chapter in the history of the two countries.

This book aims to provide not only the history (and art history) of this mural but also its wider cultural and historical contexts. The existence of both Orozco's fresco and Humphrey's mural on a college campus provides a unique juxtaposition of certain extremes of 1930s mural art. As such, their creation represents an important and fascinating historical moment while bringing into sharper focus some of the issues surrounding the politics of art and images. This book is intended as a textbook for those studying these murals and also as a guide to understanding how they fit into a troubling and difficult history of envisioning Native Americans by non-natives in American literature and popular art.

Exploring three major hubs of muralist activity in California, where indigenist imagery is prevalent, Walls of Empowerment celebrates an aesthetic that seeks to firmly establish Chicana/o sociopolitical identity in U.S. territory.