Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
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

Coffey, Mary K.

Hardcover

Art HistoryGeneral Art InstructionMexican History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0822350203
ISBN13: 9780822350200
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Apr 17 2012
Pages: 248
Weight: 2.85
Height: 1.00 Width: 8.30 Depth: 10.20
Language: English
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.

Also in

Art History

View All