Arte Mestiza

Emanuel Martinez: Arte Mestiza

Outside of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center

30 W. Dale Street, Colorado Springs, CO 80903

Admission: Free

Review by José Antonio Arellano

Since 1986, Emanuel Martinez’s mural titled Arte Mestiza has greeted visitors to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Last year, a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts enabled Martinez to restore and protect the work. Freely available to the public, this significant mural reminds us of the contributions of Spanish, Indigenous, Mexican, and Mexican Americans to the stories we tell about the histories of art. 

Emanuel Martinez restoring the 1986 mural Arte Mestiza in 2023 at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Image by Gray Warrior, courtesy of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

Arte Mestiza displays the very power of muralism, which the Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco described as “The highest, the most logical, the purest strongest form of painting.” “In this form alone,” writes Orozco, “it is one with the other arts.” [1] Martinez dramatizes Orozco’s trenchant claim by reversing the order of its logic. Arte Mestiza demonstrates its power by converting “other arts” (from architecture to wooden sculptures) into the format and affordances of muralism. 

I highlight Orozco at the start because of the suggestiveness of his insight and because his work provides an informative precursor to Arte Mestiza. Click on this link and scroll down until you see the image of the mural listed as The Workers (1926). [2] Notice how Orozco uses perspective to represent the walls of a building. On the left, the profile of a woman appears to almost merge with the depicted structural plane of the blank wall. 

José Clemente Orozco, The Workers, 1926, Fresco, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City. Image courtesy of Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso.

Two sections of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza, 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by John Mortland, courtesy of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. On the right: a depiction of the profile of a woman from José Clemente Orozco’s mural The Workers (1926).

Orozco explored this woman’s profile graphically in lithographs, but its appearance in this mural, depicted along a blank wall, appears to prompt a question: What role can muralism play in the plight of Mexico’s indigenous populations, its working class, and its displaced rural peasants ravaged by the Mexican Revolution? [3]

Arte Mestiza asks a similar question by adapting its relevance to the twentieth-century Mexican American context. It explicitly references Orozco’s profile of the woman, who, in Arte Mestiza, appears along a visual art historical timeline. This timeline is simultaneously linear—indicating lines of influence—and circular, disrupting strict chronology. I am tempted to describe the mural’s temporality as simultaneously pan-Mesoamerican and modernist, a merging of temporal senses that points to the mural’s synthesizing approach. [4]

A portion of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza depicting the Mestiza daughter, 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by John Mortland, courtesy of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

Arte Mestiza’s theme is mestizaje, a Spanish term describing the “mixing” of Spanish and Indigenous peoples. [5] The mural’s central image represents the titular Mestiza daughter joined to her Indigenous mother and European father via the symbols of a serpent and eagle. The symbolic references of these icons include the origin myth of the Mexica peoples’ homeland. [6] The Mestiza highlights the mural’s many dualities, including sky and earth, East and West, European and Indigenous, hemispheric and regional politics, experimental abstraction and social realism. The central Mestiza figure helps mediate the contentious contradictions by embodying something like a productive synthesis. [7] 

The Mestiza’s incorporation of Indigenous iconography—which is self-consciously decolonial— represents a history of activism. In the mid-1960s, ongoing political action became more prominently displayed in such iconography by activists who called themselves “Chicanos.” The term had been used in the first two decades of the twentieth century to denigrate poor Mexican migrant workers who came to the U.S. to find work. Activists in the 1960s reclaimed the term. Not simply a contingent accident of one’s birth, the proclamation “Somos Chicanos,” “We are Chicanos,” became a rallying cry of unity—of asserted pride collectively professed. Murals played an important role in consolidating the aesthetics of the movement, and Martinez helped play a key role in Denver. [8]

A section of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza depicting Diego Velázquez’s The Lady with a Fan (c. 1640), 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by José Antonio Arellano.

It is significant that the mural was created in the 1980s. By that decade, the term “Chicano” had started to come under considerable pressure for what was characterized as its gendered politics and language. Chicana feminists qualified the term to be more inclusive, a process that has developed beyond the feminist critique and continues to this day. [9] Arte Mestiza, though, retains the political and aesthetic legacy of the Chicano movement. It visually responds to the narratives that circulated during the 1980s of the “underclass” and “welfare queens.” 

A section of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza depicting El Greco’s St. Francis in Ecstasy (17th century), 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by José Antonio Arellano.

This discourse continued what the social sciences had circulated in the mid-twentieth century. [10] Mexican culture was described as either a site of lack or pathology. It either supposedly did not exist, characterized as a void awaiting content, or it was depicted as a “culture of poverty,” teaching toxic, unproductive behaviors. Women, especially women of color, tended to be placed at the center of such problems: dropping out of school too often, regularly having children out of wedlock, and raising children without the formative guidance of fathers, which would inevitably perpetuate a cycle of such behaviors. And so on. 

A detail view of the Mestiza daughter in Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza mural, 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by José Antonio Arellano.

In this mural, however, the Mestiza appears not as the source of these problems but as a solution that can mediate the contradictions—the proud consolidation of self-pride centuries in the making. The colorful aura that emanates from the central united figures appears to supply the very hues that retroactively make possible the production and history of the mural’s depicted works of art. The Mestiza is simultaneously the culmination of artistic influence and the retroactive condition of possibility for the fraught unity she embodies. 

A portion of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza depicting Pablo Picasso’s The Sailor (1934), 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by José Antonio Arellano.

Joined to the Mestiza, the European paternal figure looks toward the artistic developments that “begin” with El Greco’s St. Francis in Ecstasy (painted sometime in the 17th century) and Diego Velázquez’s The Lady with a Fan (c. 1640). These developments “end” with Pablo Picasso’s The Sailor (1934). [11] The chronological temporality, read from right to left, is disrupted by a modernist sense of tradition as described by the poet T. S. Eliot, wherein “the past” is “altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” [12] After all, Picasso considered El Greco to be “Cubist in construction,” suggesting that El Greco is both proto-Cubist and retroactively Cubist in light of Picasso. [13]

A section of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza depicting a Santero, 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by José Antonio Arellano.

As if to emphasize the rupture in linear time, the rightmost panel does not depict a point of origin. It represents a New Mexican artisan carving a Santo—a wooden sculpture traditionally made in the American Southwest for veneration within churches and homes. As the art historian Jacinto Quirarte noted in the early 1970s, the skill of such artists, called Santeros, had long been recognized by collectors and museums. [14]

A portion of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza depicting a Navajo blanket and ceramic pot, 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by José Antonio Arellano.

One such collector, Alice Bemis Taylor, amassed an assortment of New Mexican and Native American work now housed in the Fine Arts Center. [15] Arte Mestiza references this collection by depicting items from the Taylor Collection, including a Navajo blanket and ceramic pot. [16]

Reading the mural from the leftmost side toward the right, we encounter a Mayan figure that Martinez depicts by following Indigenous methods of painting that do not employ perspective and chiaroscuro. [17] A depicted crack on the wall represents the violence of invasion. This rupture visually cordons off the Mayan figure and the Indigenous ritualistic traditions from everything that follows. Martinez updated the Mayan figure, replacing what he had originally depicted as gold jewelry with jade. [18]

A portion of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza depicting a Mayan figure and the Virgen de Guadalupe, 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by John Mortland, courtesy of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

As our gaze tracks from left to right, over the represented crack in the wall, the figure of the Virgen de Guadalupe begins to indicate the merging of Spanish and Indigenous cultures. The image was most likely the work of the Indigenous artist Marcos Cipac de Aquino, who was “perhaps trained by one of the first European immigrant artists.” [19] The imposition of Christian iconography onto the figure of the Mesoamerican goddess Tonantzin helped provide a tool for conversion. 

Some Catholics, such as my Mexican parents, believe the painting’s origins to be miraculous. In this view, the original image of the Virgin is not a painting but a divine form of indexicality akin to the transfiguration of the Eucharist that transcends representation. The Virgen, in this view, synthesizes the European with the Indigenous and offers a glimpse into a potential point of contact between the earthly and the divine. 

A portion of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza depicting the Virgen de Guadalupe, 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by José Antonio Arellano.

Perhaps my verb here should be “colonizes” instead of “synthesizes.” Perhaps the image is not the index of the divine but a symptom that is all too human. This type of narrative conflict—how to frame and thereby narrate what one sees—motivates my own existential aporia and the mural’s thematic content. For it is precisely this questioning of dominant narratives that often constitutes the lived experience of the children of immigrants. 

This is why the confrontation between the European and Indigenous motivates much of the mural’s depicted Mexican art. We proceed from the image of the Guadalupe through a depicted archway, reminiscent of Pueblo architecture, and encounter one of Mexico's most influential graphic artists and political satirists: José Guadalupe Posada. His calaveras often parodied the fashions of European dandies as if to mock those who would adhere to such styles as a way of reifying a cultural hierarchy that denigrated the Indigenous. 

A portion of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza depicting Death in the style of José Guadalupe Posada. Image by John Mortland, courtesy of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

Death, in this graphic work, is both familiar and equalizing. In the larger broadside that the mural draws on, the naively heroic Don Quixote—a character who influenced the genre of the novel and Western literature—appears as a grim reminder of everyone’s fate, regardless of one’s social status. [20] Posada helped to consolidate something like a national ethos that would influence generations of artists after him.

From Posada, we return to the point where we started on this journey, to José Clemente Orozco’s depiction of a Mexican woman’s profile. In his autobiography, Orozco credits Posada’s work for igniting his own passion for artistic expression. “This was the push that first set my imagination in motion,” wrote Orozco, “and impelled me to cover paper with my earliest little figures; this was my awakening to the existence of the art of painting.” [21]

The sections of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza that pay homage to works by José Guadalupe Posada and José Clemente Orozco, 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by John Mortland, courtesy of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

Diego Rivera joins Orozco in this sentiment. In his own biography, Rivera praises Posada as “the most important of my teachers.” [22] Although we are technically on Arte Mestiza’s left side depicting Indigenous and Mexican artistic developments, we must circle back to Paris, where Rivera knew Picasso and studied painting—including Cubism—for decades.  When Rivera returned to Mexico after the Revolution, he turned away from Cubism and focused on decidedly non-European subjects. 

A portion of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza depicting Diego Rivera’s La Molendera (1924), 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by José Antonio Arellano.

The painting depicted in this mural is Rivera’s La Molendera (1924). A woman grinds the native maize using the traditional stone mortar (metate) and pestle (mano). This culinary practice predates the arrival of Europeans, and the image demonstrates Rivera’s ambition to create a distinctly Mexican art defined in its own terms. 

But what exactly are these terms? David Alfaro Siqueiros, the next artist represented in the mural, rejected the turn to Posada and Indigeneity—the “Posadaism” of his contemporaries defined as “their tendency to hark back to the primitive picturesque and artisanal values of popular art.” [23] Siqueiros chastised Rivera for selling out to foreign interests and catering to American tourists. For him, Rivera was a “Picasso in Aztecland,” a sellout all too eager to peddle domesticated images of Indigeneity to his capitalist employers and American tourists. [24]

A portion of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza depicting David Alfaro Siqueiros’ New Democracy (1945), 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by José Antonio Arellano.

For all of his criticism, though, in the mural New Democracy (1945), a portion of which is represented in Arte Mestiza, Siqueiros abandoned “his usual theme, class warfare,” and instead “took up the rhetoric of the government’s cold war ideology.” [25] Such a theme, as Robin Adèle Greeley argues, did not pose a challenge to the direction that the Mexican government took as it entered into an era of “full industrialization.” [26] It is perhaps easier to identify oneself as being on the side of the personified Democracy fighting for her freedom against the threat of totalitarianism (personified in the dead German soldier lying on the ground). It is harder to imagine and enact the practical politics necessary to counter the exploitation of workers and the continued privatization of every aspect of human life. 

A portion of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza depicting Rufino Tamayo’s America (1955), 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by José Antonio Arellano.

Not to be outdone, the younger Rufino Tamayo sought to differentiate himself from the previous muralists mentioned thus far, assuming the mantle of “universality” in his art. Tamayo turned away from the Mexican School and looked toward the New York School, which emerged triumphant after World War II. [27] For him, the particular and regional could provide access to the universal and international. But notice how his magisterial America (1955), depicted in part in Arte Mestiza, remains in dialogue with the gestures of Siqueiros’s New Democracy. 

Rufino Tamayo, America, 1955, vinylite and sand on canvas, 13 feet 2 inches x 45 feet 10 inches. Image courtesy of WikiArt.org.

Though not visible in the portion represented in Arte Mestiza, the full image depicts a personified “America” in the bottom of the pictorial composition and a series of symbolic binaries representing the fusion of the European and Indigenous. [28] America reverses the spatial logic of Arte Mestiza, with the lefthand side representing the European influence, with images including a white figure and cross and the lefthand side representing a brown figure and the Mesoamerican plumed serpent god Quetzalcoatl. Arte Mestiza’s cropping of the image to focus on the Mesoamerican aspects is thus meaningful in relation to its own spatial logic.

A portion of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza, 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by José Antonio Arellano.

From Tamayo, we return to the mural’s central figure, and can again conceptually return to Orozco’s insistence that “the purest strongest form of painting” is the mural. Compare his claim to what Jackson Pollock wrote in 1947 in an application for a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship: “I believe the easel picture to be a dying form and the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural,” he writes, “I believe the time is not yet ripe for a full transition from easel to mural.” [29] Pollock posited his large-scale canvases as a mediator, a “half-way state,” between easel painting and the teleological endpoint of painting itself. The work Pollock proposed making was “an attempt to point out the direction for the future without arriving there completely.” The endpoint in question is muralism. 

Emanuel Martinez restoring the 1986 mural Arte Mestiza in 2023 at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Image by John Mortland, courtesy of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

What might it mean to think of what was billed as the paradigmatic American form of art during the mid-twentieth century, Abstract Expressionism, as mestizo? For it is not an exaggeration to say that without the history of Mexican painting, American art as such would not have taken the shape it did. Without Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros, and Tamayo—all of whom came to the U.S. and taught such figures as Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler—New York would have never “replaced” Paris as the “center” of the art world. [30]

In the double helix artistic timeline depicted in Arte Mestiza, we can see, say, Picasso’s influence on Tamayo, who was closer to the School of Paris that Rivera had left behind. But we might recall that Picasso would not be Picasso without African sculpture and Oceanic treasures. We can begin to imagine a multidimensional timeline that would depict the complex interconnections of influence. Perhaps mestizaje—understood as cultural fusion— is the very condition of possibility for art developments as such. 

A view of one of the walls of Emanuel Martinez’s Arte Mestiza, 1986/2023, acrylic and oil on concrete, 200 x 10 feet. Image by José Antonio Arellano.

By wanting to produce a synthesis, mestizaje could erase the realities of Indigeneity. [31] The very solution offered by the mural might not be adequate to address the histories of violence. This type of debate—which argues over the parameters of identity and politics—will persist ad infinitum. Who constitutes “the people” for whom a mural claims to speak? [32] How does it have access to the people’s collective desires? Who exactly does one mean by “the people”? Who constitutes the speaking “us”? The very voice of politics as such is a collective voice that must continuously, perhaps contentiously, negotiate these very boundaries. There is no alternative. Such a continued conversation—like Posada’s skeletal Quixote riding as the figure of death— is our fate.  

It would be a mistake, though, to stand in our pre-dug graves and wait for the inevitable. Arte Mestiza presents a history of conflict that speaks in the present tense with a polyphonic collective voice. The voices I hear when standing before this mural tell us—me and you—that the songs of hope are worth singing even when our notes are dissonant. 

José Antonio Arellano (he/his) is an Associate Professor of English and Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy. He holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. He is currently working on two manuscripts titled Race Class: Reading Mexican American Literature in the Era of Neoliberalism, 1981-1984 and Life in Search of Form: 20th Century Mexican American Literature and the Problem of Art.

[1] José Clemente Orozco, “New World, New Races, and New Art,” Creative Art 4 (January 1929), 46. This document is available through the helpful Documents Project of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The ICAA archives thousands of Documents of Latin American and Latino Art: icaa.mfah.org/s/en/item/782312#?c=&m=&s=&cv=&xywh=-974%2C879%2C3412%2C1909.

[2] “José Clemente Orozco: Related Murals.” San José Museum of Art, sjmusart.org/related-murals.

[3] In the mid-1920s, Orozco explored this profile graphically in lithographs now available in several American institutions, including The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Library of Congress. For an example, see José Clemente Orozco and Printer George C. Miller American, “José Clemente Orozco: A Mexican Woman in Profile Facing Right,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1 Jan. 1970, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/715395.

[4] “Time” in the “pan-Mesoamerican calendrical system… ordered and linked the present to the past and future.” Time was understood cyclically, creating patterns that overlapped to create “junctures” in which past, present, and future could touch and interact. Elizabeth Hill Boone, “Time, the Ritual Calendar, and Divination,” Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate (University of Texas Press, 2007), 13. See note nine below for what I mean by a modernist sense of tradition.

[5] 18th-century Spanish colonizers attempted to reify a hierarchy of race by categorically codifying it. This history of colonization differs from the racial logic that developed in the postbellum United States. Whereas in the U.S., “one drop of black blood” was legally sufficient to categorize one as “black,” the Spanish created a more complicated system for tracking the mixtures of Spanish, Indigenous, and African peoples, with over a dozen different racial categories, including “mestizos,” “castizos,” and “mulattos.”  See Carly Silver, “The Paintings That Tried (and Failed) to Codify Race.” JSTOR Daily, 10 Oct. 2020, daily.jstor.org/the-paintings-that-tried-and-failed-to-codify-race/. For an account of the “one drop rule,” see David A. Hollinger, “One Drop & One Hate,” American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 24 May 2023, http://www.amacad.org/publication/one-drop-one-hate.

[6] You will register the echoes of this myth in the middle symbol on the Mexican flag. For a retelling of the Mexica origin myth, see Angel Vigil, The Eagle on the Cactus: Traditional Stories from Mexico (Libraries Unlimited, Inc., 2000).

[7] This insight was made available to me after reading James Oles’s account, following Octavio Paz, of Mexican art’s “mediation” of the confrontation between Spanish and Indigenous traditions via mestizaje. See James Oles, Art and Architecture in Mexico (Thames & Hudson, 2013), 9.

[8] For an account of the legacy of this movement and muralism in Denver, see Stacy J.  Platt, “The Fight to Preserve Denver’s Chicano Murals.” Hyperallergic, 23 June 2023, hyperallergic.com/829080/the-fight-to-preserve-denvers-chicano-murals/. See also Lucha Martinez de Luna, “Chicano Murals in Colorado: The First Decade.” Colorado Heritage, September/October 2015 (Denver: History Colorado, 2015).

[9] For an example of this type of critique, see Gloria Anzaldúa’s account of the rise of the “Movimiento Macha” and of the desire to establish new forms of sociality beyond the gendered Chicano movement in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987), 229. For a more recent form of criticism of the Chicano movement, see Jacqueline Hidalgo, “Beyond Aztlán: Latina/o/X Students Let Go of Their Mythic Homeland,” Contending Modernities, 6 May 2023, contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/beyond-aztlan/.

[10] One of the best accounts of this history is available in John Alba Cutler, Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015).

[11] El Greco explored the Franciscan theme in several paintings, but the version depicted in the mural may have been created by one of his followers. See Pablo De Monte, “San Francisco En Éxtasis.” Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, http://www.bellasartes.gob.ar/coleccion/obra/8541/. Accessed 4 Jan. 2024.

[12] T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent. For Eliot, as the introduction of the essay states, “past works of art form an order or ‘tradition’; however, that order is always being altered by a new work which modifies the ‘tradition’ to make room for itself.”

[13] Picasso is quoted in John Richardson, “Picasso’s Apocalyptic Whorehouse,” The New York Review of Books, 23 April 1987, www.nybooks.com/articles/1987/04/23/picassos-apocalyptic-whorehouse/.

[14] Jacinto Quirarte, Mexican American Artists (University of Texas Press, 1973), 26. 

[15] Encouraged by Julie Penrose and Elizabeth Sage Hare, Taylor funded the construction of what became the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center to house the collection. See Grandeur Restored: The Renovation and Expansion of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 2007), 14.

[16] My thanks to Nancy Ríos for bringing this fact to my attention. Nancy Ríos, “The City as Venue,” Public Lecture, 6 Aug. 2021, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

[17] See Oles’ description of “the indigenous aesthetic traditions: the imagery, outlined in black and filled with solid color” (7) and Quirarte’s description of the Mesoamerican pictural approach in which “all figures are presented within a single frontal plane” (xix).

[18] See Isaac O’Dell, “Renowned Colorado-Based Artist to Restore 37-Year-Old Mural at CC’s Fine Arts Center.” Colorado Springs Gazette, 11 Sept. 2023, gazette.com/arts-entertainment/renowned-colorado-based-artist-to-restore-37-year-old-mural-at-ccs-fine-arts-center/article_bc19a2de-4dc0-11ee-9630-cbc3efb8c5b5.html.

[19] Oles, 88.

[20] The original broadside includes a stanza of a poem by Posada’s publisher, Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, the theme of which is the sobering reminder that death, regardless of one’s education and status, is inevitable. The stanza reads, “Ni curas ni literatos, / ni letrados ni doctors, / escaparán los señores / de que les dé malos ratos.” For a scan of the broadside see https://www.moma.org/collection/works/69392. For a different use of this image, see https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1998-1004-17.

[21] José Clemente Orozco, An Autobiography, (University of Texas Press, 1985), 8.

[22] Diego Rivera and Gladys Stevens March, My Art, My Life: An Autobiography, (Dover Publications, 1991), 18.

[23] Antonio Rodríguez, Posada: “El artista que retrató a una época,” (Editorial Domés, 1977), 194.

[24] Siqueiros is quoted in Robin Adèle Greeley, “Muralism and the State in Post-Revolution Mexico, 1920-1970,” Mexican Muralism: A Critical History, (University of California Press, 2012), 49.

[25] Greeley, 29.

[26] Ibid., 28. 

[27] See Mary K. Coffey’s commentary on “Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991).” Sothebys.Com, www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2008/latin-american-art-n08493/lot.12.html.

[28] Juan Carlos Pereda quotes Tamayo’s description of the symbolism of American in his commentary on “Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991).” Sothebys.Com, www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2008/latin-american-art-n08493/lot.12.html.

[29] Quoted in Ellen G. Landau, “Reinventing Muralism: Pollock, Mexican Art, and the Origins of Abstract Painting,” Mexico and American Modernism (Yale University Press, 2013), 66-68. If Pollock’s description sounds like Clement Greenberg’s style of teleological art history, it should. According to Landau, Greenberg may have helped Pollock write it.

[30] Pollock studied with Siqueiros in New York, learning methods for “pouring, dripping, and spattering … as a way to court ‘controlled accidents’” (Landau 83). And it would not be an exaggeration to say that without Rufino Tamayo’s pedagogy, Helen Frankenthaler would not have developed as an artist. Frankenthaler claims that enrolling at Dalton, where Tamayo taught, “saved her life.” Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art (Little, Brown and Company, 2018), 316. According to Gabriel, with Tamayo, Frankenthaler “began to understand what it meant to be an artist, the seriousness of it, the attitude an artist needed to have toward his or her work. And of course, Tamayo helped her through the initial technical problems of learning to paint” (316).    

[31] My thanks again to Nancy Ríos, for highlighting this point of conflict when speaking about Arte Mestiza.

[32] See Robin Adèle Greeley, “Introduction,” Mexican Muralism: A Critical History, (University of California Press, 2012), 2-3. Murals as murals often dramatize this question because they can mediate between the expression of a people against the dictums of the state. But murals can also be the state's mouthpiece to coalesce and circulate its views. Murals can be the pleasant decoration on corporate headquarters and unaffordable apartment buildings. Politics is not an inherent feature of any artistic practice. Politics must always be negotiated.