Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945

Feb 17, 2020–Jan 31, 2021

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Diego Rivera came to the United States in 1930 as the most acclaimed artist to have worked on the Mexican government’s public mural program—the “hero of the Western world,” one critic called him. After completing three murals in San Francisco, he was commissioned in 1932 to create what became a twenty-seven-panel mural cycle filling all four walls of the covered courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Arts. In Mexico, Rivera had been known as a Communist whose murals glorified the revolution and condemned capitalist corruption. His encounter in the United States with modern industry catalyzed his embrace of an altogether different subject matter: the abundance of the country’s natural resources and its engineering and industrial achievements. The theme of productive labor had tremendous resonance for American artists across the geographic and political spectrum working under the auspices of the various mural programs established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as part of his New Deal initiatives to promote economic recovery. For these artists, who were seeking to assure the nation of its self-worth as it grappled with the devastating fallout caused by the Great Depression, Rivera’s art was an inspiring model. They adopted Rivera’s subject matter and his decorative, descriptive style, crowded imagery, multiple vanishing points, and montage aesthetic in the thousands of murals they created in public buildings across the country.

Examine the many intricate details of Rivera's Detroit Institute of Arts mural cycle by zooming into images of the courtyard's north and south walls, and see the work in its entirety in this rotating panorama of the space. Photography by David Mariotti.

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A painting study depicting different scenes including a classroom and men shoveling.

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Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945

Rivera and the New Deal

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Ben Shahn, Study for Jersey Homesteads Mural, c. 1936

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On the Hour

Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945

Rivera and the New Deal

5

Ben Shahn, Study for Jersey Homesteads Mural, c. 1936

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection