Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945
Feb 17, 2020–Jan 31, 2021
Abelardo L. Rodriguez Market
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The Abelardo L. Rodriguez Market in Mexico City was the most important Mexican urban renewal project of the 1930s. Named in honor of the revolutionary general who served as the country’s president from 1932 to 1934, the market was designed to replace the city’s congested street markets with a modern facility that would also serve as a cultural and educational space, housing not only a market but also a daycare center, theater, pharmacy, dance hall, and library. Murals portraying the production and distribution of food and the importance of hygiene and health were to cover the market’s interior. Diego Rivera was technical director of the mural project, tasked with advising the artists and approving their final sketches, but their actual work was overseen by the American-born artist Paul Stevenson, who had settled permanently in Mexico in 1924 and changed his name to Pablo O’Higgins. Of the ten artists who created murals for the market, four were American: O’Higgins, the sisters Marion and Grace Greenwood, and Isamu Noguchi. All of the Mexican artists—Ramón Alva Guadarrama, Ángel Bracho, Raúl Gamboa, Antonio Pujol, Pedro Rendón, and Miguel Tzab Trejo—were former Rivera assistants. Encouraged by O’Higgins to depict present-day realities of exploitation and misery as straightforwardly as possible, the American muralists avoided affirmative images of hygiene and food production in favor of those emphasizing the social and economic injustices suffered by agricultural and urban workers at the hands of capitalists. Noguchi expanded this directive, including a swastika among other images in his mural to suggest “the machinery of war, coercion, and bigotry.”
Artists
- Charles Henry Alston
- Ramón Alva Guadarrama
- Lola Álvarez Bravo
- Luis Arenal
- Belle Baranceanu
- Will Barnet
- Carleton Beals
- Thomas Hart Benton
- Henry Bernstein
- Emil Bisttram
- Julius Bloch
- Lucienne Bloch
- Anita Brenner
- Jacob Burck
- Elizabeth Catlett
- Stuart Chase
- Howard Cook
- Miguel Covarrubias
- Aaron Douglas
- Sergei Eisenstein
- Jesús Escobedo
- Philip Evergood
- Seymour Fogel
- Ford Motor Company
- Hugo Gellert
- Xavier Gonzalez
- Marion Greenwood
- William Gropper
- Philip Guston
- Eitarō Ishigaki
- María Izquierdo
- Everett Gee Jackson
- Joe Jones
- Frida Kahlo
- Jacob Lawrence
- Harold Lehman
- Michael Lenson
- Mardonio Magaña
- Bendor Mark
- Fletcher Martin
- Leopoldo Méndez
- Carlos Mérida
- Edward Millman
- Tina Modotti
- Roberto Montenegro
- Emilio Gómez Muriel
- Hideo Benjamin Noda
- José Clemente Orozco
- Jackson Pollock
- Alfredo Ramos Martínez
- Anton Refregier
- Diego Rivera
- Ben Shahn
- Henrietta Shore
- Mitchell Siporin
- David Alfaro Siqueiros
- Harry Sternberg
- Paul Strand
- Thelma Johnson Streat
- Rufino Tamayo
- Edward Weston
- Charles White
- Hale Aspacio Woodruff