Okay so I have 3 midterms this week and only had time to read Mexican Muralism and the Offical Public Sphere so my blog will mainly focus on that. Before I get into the actual text, throughout the reading I found myself googling a lot of the art work of the artists mentioned and I found a really cool website that has most of these artists work compiled –  https://www.wikiart.org/en/artists-by-nation/mexican

All three of the main muralists have pretty much every mural uploaded in High Rez and i spent about an hour looking at artists from latin america.

Getting into the actual article I found it very interesting. I didn’t know too much regarding the history of muralism in mexico, but I was familiar with some of the murals and their themes. Primarily, I think the main takeaway from this article is that Muralism wasn’t an entirely natural artistic movement. What I mean to say by this is that the roots of Mexican Muralism were somewhat forced. This most obviously struck me when talking about Vasconcelos vision as education minister. The article denotes his plans for muralism and his intended effects of its institution in national identity. Most importantly there is one section where Vasconcelos expects the recreation of certain western classical literary themes in his commisioned murals. During this time the artists behind the creation of murals where instead focusing on indigenous mexican history. Another interesting part of this article was the Author defining a clear purpose of murals. Murals can so successfully transmit nationalist themes through their place in a community and can also offer easily understood political discourse to a less educated population. Throughout the article it struck me that the muralism of mexico was very anti-capitalist and the big 3 had murals that empowered the proletariat as well as depicted a communal sense of creation(the rich people, 1924, Orozco/ death of the capitalist, Rivera 1929/ death to the invader, Siquieros, 1941) The irony of the state sanctioned murals was their obvious stance against the state. Beyond from what I’ve said I had a hard time understanding a lot of the actual history but i think the main point was that the government played a heavy role in the politicization of these artworks and this resulted in the decline of the form as an artistic industry.