How A Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture

This is a study of the reciprocal relationship between Mexican muralism and the three major Mexican museums&—the Palace of Fine Arts, the National History Museum, and the National Anthropology Museum.

Stephanie J. Smith brings Mexican politics and art together, chronicling the turbulent relations between radical artists and the postrevolutionary Mexican state. The revolution opened space for new political ideas, but by the late 1920s many government officials argued that consolidating the nation required coercive measures toward dissenters. While artists and intellectuals, some of them professed Communists, sought free expression in matters both artistic and political, Smith reveals how they simultaneously learned the fine art of negotiation with the increasingly authoritarian government in order to secure clout and financial patronage. But the government, Smith shows, also had reason to accommodate artists, and a surprising and volatile interdependence grew between the artists and the politicians. Involving well-known artists such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as some less well known, including Tina Modotti, Leopoldo Mendez, and Aurora Reyes, politicians began to appropriate the artists' nationalistic visual images as weapons in a national propaganda war. High-stakes negotiating and co-opting took place between the two camps as they sparred over the production of generally accepted notions and representations of the revolution's legacy—and what it meant to be authentically Mexican.

Featuring international contributions from leading and emerging scholars, this innovative Research Handbook presents a panoramic view of how law sees visual art, and how visual art sees law. It resists the conventional approach to art and law as inherently dissonant – one a discipline preoccupied with rationality, certainty and objectivity; the other a creative enterprise ensconced in the imaginary and inviting multiple, unique and subjective interpretations. Blending these two distinct disciplines, this unique Research Handbook bridges the gap between art and law.

Essays on the rise of community-focused art projects and anti-monuments in Mexico since the 1980s. Mexico has long been lauded and studied for its post-revolutionary public art, but recent artistic practices have raised questions about how public art is created and for whom it is intended. In The New Public Art, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, together with a number of scholars, artists, and activists, looks at the rise of community-focused art projects, from collective cinema to off-stage dance and theatre, and the creation of anti-monuments that have redefined what public art is and how people have engaged with it across the country since the 1980s. The New Public Art investigates the reemergence of collective practices in response to privatization, individualism, and alienating violence. Focusing on the intersection of art, politics, and notions of public participation and belonging, contributors argue that a new, non-state-led understanding of "the public" came into being in Mexico between the mid-1980s and the late 2010s. During this period, community-based public art bore witness to the human costs of abuses of state and economic power while proposing alternative forms of artistic creation, activism, and cultural organization.

In the 1930s, the artistic and cultural patronage of celebrated Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas transformed a small Michoacán city, Pátzcuaro, into a popular center for national tourism. Cárdenas commissioned public monuments and archeological excavations; supported new schools, libraries, and a public theater; developed tourism sites and infrastructure, including the Museo de Artes e Industrias Populares; and hired artists to paint murals celebrating regional history, traditions, and culture. The creation of Pátzcuaro was formative for Mexico; not only did it provide an early model for regional economic and cultural development, but it also helped establish some of Mexico's most enduring national myths, rituals, and institutions. In Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico, Jennifer Jolly argues that Pátzcuaro became a microcosm of cultural power during the 1930s and that we find the foundations of modern Mexico in its creation. Her extensive historical and archival research reveals how Cárdenas and the artists and intellectuals who worked with him used cultural patronage as a guise for radical modernization in the region. Jolly demonstrates that the Pátzcuaro project helped define a new modern body politic for Mexico, in which the population was asked to emulate Cárdenas by touring the country and seeing and embracing its land, history, and people. Ultimately, by offering Mexicans a means to identify and engage with power and privilege, the creation of Pátzcuaro placed art and tourism at the center of Mexico's postrevolutionary nation building project.

A revolutionary approach exploring legal themes such as justice, legitimacy, sovereignty, and power through close readings of major works of art.

Since the 2011 Arab Spring street art has been a vehicle for political discourse in the Middle East, and has generated much discussion in both the popular media and academia. Yet, this conversation has generalised street art and identified it as a singular form with identical styles and objectives throughout the region. Street art's purpose is, however, defined by the socio-cultural circumstances of its production. Middle Eastern artists thus adopt distinctive methods in creating their individual work and responding to their individual environments. Here, in this new book, Sabrina De Turk employs rigorous visual analysis to explore the diversity of Middle Eastern street art and uses case studies of countries as varied as Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Palestine, Bahrain and Oman to illustrate how geographic specifics impact upon its function and aesthetic. Her book will be of significant interest to scholars specialising in art from the Middle East and North Africa and those who bring an interdisciplinary perspective to Middle East studies.

All science proceeds by progressively building on the work of others while remaining open to new discoveries and challenging existing conceptual frameworks. The same is true of culturo-behavior science. This textbook presents the scientifically rigorous work of the last several decades that has taken a behavior-analytic view of social and cultural processes, with an eye for contributions that address social and cultural issues. The chapters herein explore and elaborate on the history, theories, and methodologies of culturo-behavior science and those of its researchers and practitioners. Throughout this volume, the authors intentionally prompt students to both learn from and question the current theory and methods while shaping their own research and practice. This book presents multiple intersecting perspectives intended for graduate-level students of behavior analysis. Contributors to this volume include many of the major scholars and practitioners conducting research and/or practicing in communities and larger cultural systems. Their work is scientifically guided, systemic, and ecologically valid; it includes basic research as well as efforts having applications in community health, sustainability, environmental issues, and social justice, among other matters. There is material here to support specialists preparing to do research or practice within community and cultural-level systems. As well, students who intend to do direct and clinical work will find the background they need to make contributions to the field as engaged, informed citizens.