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queens-gambit-the-crown-brooklyn-museum-
exhibit/

her team of costume designersGabriele Binder

César Award for Best Production Design

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Gabriele Binder
https://www.buzzfeed.com/noradominick/the-
queens-gambit-costumes-gabriele-binder-
interview

the queen's gambit costume designer

Column: The art show of 2020 and how it

unearthed the Mexican influences in American
art
A detail from Alfredo Ramos Martínez’s “The Protector,” 1932, a
tempera and chalk drawing on a page from the Los Angeles Times
from the 1930s. 
 (Carolina A. Miranda / Los Angeles Times)
By CAROLINA A. MIRANDACOLUMNIST 

DEC. 10, 2020

6 AM

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There is perhaps no more satisfying sendoff to the xenophobia of the Trump

era than an exhibition that rewrites American art history and, in the process,
makes it more Mexican.

That exhibition is “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American

Art, 1925-1945,” which opened at New York’s Whitney Museum in February
and, one pandemic later, has miraculously managed to remain on view. The
show takes some of the most recognizable U.S. painters of the first half of the
20th century and meticulously documents the ways in which those artists were
indelibly shaped by the politics and aesthetics of the Mexican mural
movement.
Jackson Pollock. Philip Guston. Jacob Lawrence. Thomas Hart Benton. Ben
Shahn. Charles White. The list of artists influenced by the Mexicans reads like
a literal who’s who of American painting.

The three major Mexican muralists — Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros
and José Clemente Orozco (known collectively as los tres grandes) — all
spent long stretches in the U.S. throughout the 1930s. During that time, they
taught and exhibited and completed mural commissions in Los Angeles, San
Francisco, Detroit and New York.

Guston helped produce a mural by Siqueiros in L.A. for the Chouinard Art
Institute; Shahn served as an assistant on Rivera’s infamous Rockefeller
Center mural in New York (the one that was destroyed because Rivera
included an image of Vladimir Lenin in the composition).
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-12-10/the-art-show-
of-2020-and-how-it-unearthed-the-mexican-influences-in-american-art?
fbclid=IwAR3NKAxWLw3V4e6nCZEBUdzAx-
2ZgvRct3L1_gioACSn2xTEHtMZ0aTcnnk

https://www.descubrirelarte.es/2017/11/0
1/los-tres-grandes-muralistas-orozco-
rivera-y-alfaro.html
Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and
José Clemente Orozco
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/about/
curatorial_staff/matthew_yokobosky
mathew yokobosky, senior curator of
fashion
Mathew Yokobosky, Senior Curator of
Fashion
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibi
tions/jean_paul_gaultier
Mathew Yokobosky, Senior Curator of
Fashion and Material Culture, Brooklyn
Museum, who has designed such
blockbuster fashion exhibitions as The
Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier

Walter Tevis
John James Audubon"Birds Of America"The American
Woodsman" in
Londonhttps://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-300-
21545-8
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/catalog/ornithology-2019
Yale University Press,
Alexander Wilson
 Jacques Louis David,
Kata Weber, “Pieces of a Woman”
Chuck Palahniuk

Edward Norton 
https://variety.com/2020/film/news/2020-10-
screenwriters-to-watch-1234781021/

Allan Scott
Walter Tevis

Christie’s in New York

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/salvat
or-mundi-leonardo-da-vinci-
whereabouts/index.html
https://www.christies.com/features/Leonar
do-and-Post-War-results-New-York-8729-
3.aspx
https://www.christies.com/features/The-
last-da-Vinci-Salvator-Mundi-8598-3.aspx

A panel from Jacob Lawrence’s “Migration Series,” painted in 1940-41.

Lawrence said he was inspired by the architectonic compositions of
Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco.
(The Phillips Collection / Artists Rights Society)
The presence of the Mexican muralists helped shift the course of American
art, feeding an interest in socially, politically and racially conscious work that
engaged the broadest possible viewing public.

Lawrence and White were inspired by Orozco’s architectonic compositions

and the visceral ways in which he portrayed struggle, elements that found
their way into the American artists’ depictions of the Black experience in the
United States.

Shahn, the relentless chronicler of American labor, was influenced by

Rivera’s densely packed scenes. Guston was motivated by the politics — and
later went on to produce other socially minded murals (including one in
Morelia, Mexico, with friend and colleague Reuben Kadish). Late in his
career, Guston would become known for his darkly subversive canvases of the
Ku Klux Klan (canvases that inspire controversy still).
Philip Guston, “Bombardment,” 1937. U.S. and Mexican artists both
used the language of baroque painting to tell modern stories.
(Philadelphia Museum of Art)

The influence extended beyond the canvas. Los tres grandes indirectly helped

shape U.S. cultural policy too.

In 1933, George Biddle, an artist who had spent time with Rivera in Mexico,
wrote a letter to his friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had recently been
sworn in as president. In it, he told Roosevelt about the ways in which the
Mexican government had funded the creation of murals on government
buildings as a way of expressing “the social ideas of the Mexican
Revolution.”
Roosevelt passed the letter along to the Treasury Department, which launched
a public works project in government buildings. This was followed, a year
later, by the establishment of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal
Art Project, a program that helped keep thousands of artists employed during
the Great Depression, and resulted in the production of thousands of public
murals and works of sculpture.

José Clemente Orozco, “Barricade (Barricada),” 1931. The Mexican

artist inspired figures such as Jacob Lawrence and Jackson Pollock.
(Museum of Modern Art / SCALA, Art Resource)

The historic links between prominent American artists and los tres

grandes have been fairly well documented. (There is a rather legendary
photo of Pollock hanging out with Siqueiros outside a workshop that the
Mexican artist led in New York during the 1930s.) But “Vida Americana” is
the first exhibition to systematically explore the ways in which those linkages
reshaped the Americans — and the way in which it reframes a well-trod
history is seismic.
“The idea that the French influenced U.S. art history, that still remains the
case,” says Whitney curator Barbara Haskell, who conceived the exhibition.
“But this upends that.”

As Kadish once said: “Siqueiros coming to L.A. meant as much then as did
the Surrealists coming to New York in the ’40s.”

Even Pollock, the rugged, Wyoming-born icon of U.S. painting, saw the
nature of his work shift as a result of his encounter with the muralists. The
artist spent formative years in Los Angeles, during which he paid a visit to
Orozco’s mural of Prometheus at Pomona College, a work he described as
“the greatest painting done in modern times.”

After his move to New York, Pollock worked at Siqueiros’ Experimental

Workshop in Manhattan, where he tried out different materials. (Siqueiros was
an important innovator in that arena, early on employing industrial materials
such as car paint and spray guns.)
David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Zapata,” 1931. The artist influenced artists on
two U.S. coasts through his teachings and mural commissions.
(Lee Stalsworth / Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden)

The arrival of “Vida Americana” amid a national election — one involving a

sitting president who has long espoused anti-Mexican rhetoric — lands like a
call for greater tolerance. It also forces some intense self examination, since to
admire 20th century American painting is also to admire its Mexican
influences.

Plus, the subject matter couldn’t be more relevant.

“These are themes that are still so active, whether it’s unemployment or racial
injustice or the fight for workers rights,” says Haskell, who organized the
show in collaboration with assistant curator Marcela Guerrero and curatorial
assistants Sarah Humphreville and Alana Hernandez.

Another interesting parallel between today and that era: During the Great
Depression, even as arts institutions were hailing the genius of the Mexican
muralists, the U.S. federal government was busy “repatriating” — a.k.a.
deporting — Mexicans and Mexican Americans, characterizing them as “a
great financial burden” to the country.

If you aren’t in New York to see the show, the beautifully illustrated catalog,
published by Yale University Press, offers great consolation.

Siqueiros coming to L.A. meant as much then as did the Surrealists coming to
New York in the ’40s.
REUBEN KADISH, PAINTER
Interestingly, a good part of the “Vida Americana” story takes place in
California.

Rivera painted key murals in the Bay Area — at the San Francisco Art
Institute and City College of San Francisco. Orozco painted at Pomona.
Siqueiros taught mural painting at the Chouinard Art Institute and also painted
the “America Tropical” mural at Olvera Street in 1932, exploring themes of
colonial genocide and depicting a dead Indigenous man under an American
eagle. (The work famously was whitewashed, then restored in 2012.)

Alfredo Ramos Martinez, “La Malinche,” 1940. The artist frequently

engaged Indigenous themes in his work.
(Phoenix Art Museum)
Figures such as Alfredo Ramos Martínez, a turn of the 20th century painter
who was born in Mexico but made Los Angeles his home in the 1930s, also
were an important part of the scene, depositing murals all over Southern
California (including Scripps College). In addition, his work is held in the
permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Ramos Martínez has numerous works in the show, including a stunning

canvas from 1940 titled “The Malinche (Young Girl of Yalala, Oaxaca),”
which offers a cinematic close-up of a woman who impassively stares down
the viewer.

But most poignant is a drawing of a man on a sheet of Los Angeles Times

newsprint. Amid the personals and ads for auction sales, the viewer is forced
to confront the contours of the Indigenous man’s face. His story may not be
written on the pages of the newspaper but it is there. You just have to look for
it.