How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State

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&mdash;the Palace of Fine Arts, the National History Museum, and the National Anthropology Museum&mdash;Coffey illuminates the institutionalization of muralism and the political and aesthetic issues it raised. She focuses on the period between 1934, when Jos&eacute; Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera were commissioned to create murals in the Palace of Fine Arts, through the crisis of state authority in the 1960s. Coffey highlights a reciprocal relationship between Mexico's mural art and its museums. Muralism shaped exhibition practices, which affected the politics, aesthetics, and reception of mural art. Interpreting the iconography of Mexico's murals, she focuses on representations of mestizo identity, the preeminent symbol of postrevolutionary Mexico. Coffey argues that those gendered representations reveal a national culture project more invested in race and gender inequality than in race and class equality.

Arts & Photography

Coffey, Mary K.

History & Criticism

Duke University Press Books

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. She focuses on the period between 1934, when José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera were commissioned to create murals in the Palace of Fine Arts, through the crisis of state authority in the 1960s. Coffey highlights a reciprocal relationship between Mexico's mural art and its museums. Muralism shaped exhibition practices, which affected the politics, aesthetics, and reception of mural art. Interpreting the iconography of Mexico's murals, she focuses on representations of mestizo identity, the preeminent symbol of postrevolutionary Mexico. Coffey argues that those gendered representations reveal a national culture project more invested in race and gender inequality than in race and class equality.

This is the latest of American contemporary artist Fred Wilson's views on art and its sheltering institution, the museum. Wilson is best known for site-specific installations in which he rearranges museum collections into unusual displays of seemingly disparate objects. Using what appear to be standard curatorial and display practices, Wilson's exhibits examine unexpected relationships among objects, people, and places. Wilson developed So Much Trouble in the World at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College using the museum's permanent collection to shed light on the politics of museum collecting, cultural representation, and human nature. The exhibit raises questions about our past and its relationship to the present--whether at Dartmouth, in the wider United States, or beyond our borders. Wilson encourages viewers to scrutinize their own expectations of museums, art, and society in light of the economic and ideological mechanisms and relationships that shape them.The essayists in this book explore Wilson's installation, including the many artists, statesmen, showmen, and nameless others whom the artist encountered while producing So Much Trouble in the World. Daniel Webster, the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, Martin Luther King Jr., Francisco de Goya, Jacques Callot, Abraham Lincoln, Samson Occom, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Robert L. Ripley, and the horrific and tragic story of Ota Benga all have a place in this extraordinary installation and publication.

Fred Wilson: So Much Trouble in the World: Believe It or Not!

WILSON, FRED

Hagedorn, Jessica Tarahata

Individual Artists

Hood Museum of Art

Orozco's American Epic: Myth, History, and the Melancholy of Race

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. While his title invokes the heroic epic form, the mural indicts history as complicit in colonial violence. It questions the claims of Manifest Destiny in the United States and the Mexican desire to mend the wounds of conquest in pursuit of a postcolonial national project. In Orozco's American Epic Mary K. Coffey places Orozco in the context of his contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and demonstrates the Epic's power as a melancholic critique of official indigenism, industrial progress, and Marxist messianism. In the process, Coffey finds within Orozco's work a call for justice that resonates with contemporary debates about race, immigration, borders, and nationality.

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. While his title invokes the heroic epic form, the mural indicts history as complicit in colonial violence. It questions the claims of Manifest Destiny in the United States and the Mexican desire to mend the wounds of conquest in pursuit of a postcolonial national project. In Orozco's American Epic Mary K. Coffey places Orozco in the context of his contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and demonstrates the Epic's power as a melancholic critique of official indigenism, industrial progress, and Marxist messianism. In the process, Coffey finds within Orozco's work a call for justice that resonates with contemporary debates about race, immigration, borders, and nationality.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Coffey, Mary K.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Coffey, Mary K.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Coffey, Mary K.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State

How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State

Fred Wilson: So Much Trouble in the World: Believe It or Not!

Orozco's American Epic: Myth, History, and the Melancholy of Race

Orozco's American Epic: Myth, History, and the Melancholy of Race