Week 4:
Mexican Museum

August 7, 2013

The fourth week, surprisingly, was shorter than the previous weeks in San Francisco. Along with other interns, I worked on the three timelines for three days. Since the museum holds Mexican and Latino art collections, each timeline had to be in English and Spanish. I continued to work on Jose Guadalupe Posada’s timeline and began searching for images to put along with the dates. Not only did I want to add some of his well known artworks, but also images that would pertain more to his life such as photographs of his shop, family, himself, etc. Posada may not have lived through the entire Mexican Revolution, but he influenced a great generation of Mexican artists such as the Big Three (Los Tres Grandes), who changed the view of Mexican art and brought about a cultural revolution. The Big Three, namely Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera, executed their art very well, and made powerful statements with their murals. In the early to mid 20th century, Posada, Orozco, Siqueiros, Rivera, and other Mexican artists challenged the power of the elite and government and brought awareness to the conditions of indigenous people.

I am also continuing to email artists in San Francisco to interview them. I am hoping to get in contact with particular women that were part of a group named Las Mujeres Muralistas (The Muralist Women), who painted murals in the 1970s. Even today, most mural painting is done by men. I think that when the Mujeres Muralistas group formed, it was supposed to bring change in the focus and power of mural art, like a female mural “renaissance”.