How Mexico’s Muralists Lit a Fire Under U.S. Artists

Zapatistas, Clemente Orozco’s 1931 painting of the Mexican peasant guerrillas
"From floated proposal to finished product, 'Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945' at the Whitney Museum of American Art represents a decade of hard thought and labor, and the effort has paid off. The show is stupendous, and complicated, and lands right on time. Just by existing it accomplishes three vital things. ... Judging by the story told here, we should be actively inviting our southern neighbor northward to enrich our cultural soil. That story, a hemispheric one, begins in Mexico in the 1920s. After 10 years of civil war and revolution, that country’s new constitutional government turned to art to invent and broadcast a unifying national self-image, one that emphasized both its deep roots in indigenous, pre-Hispanic culture and the heroisms of its recent revolutionary struggles. ..."
NY Times
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Eitaro Ishigaki’s Soldiers of the People’s Front (The Zero Hour), circa 1936-37.