CDMX: Modern Visual Culture of Mexico City

Catalog description

This seminar explores the visual cultures of Mexico City, one of the cultural capitals of Latin America, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Muralism to the street interventions of Los Grupos, and from Surrealist exiles to international artists who make the city their base today, CDMX has been the nexus for a wide array of artistic networks, approaches, and movements. The material, aesthetic, and social-cultural remains of the histories of colonization and slavery as well as the living presence of Indigenous communities, creoles (criollos), Afro-Mexicans, and mestizos (people of mixed descent) make Mexico City a unique, critical locus for such artistic imaginaries. In the twentieth century, the capital transformed from a modest and essentially agrarian locale, attracting (primarily Indigenous) workers from across the nation, into a contemporary megalopolis (the third largest city in the world). From paintings and photographs in the early and mid-century that directly figured the city’s marginalized, racialized bodies and colonias within broader efforts to define race and nation in Mexico, to contemporary spatial practices that are rooted in the formal logic of Mexico City’s margins, artists have drawn upon and enacted urban sites to reveal the city’s racial and social tensions and inequities. Covering a wide range of material, including performance, architecture, graphics, photography, public sculpture, murals, film, popular/mass art, and urbanism, this seminar asks how has this city inspired and impacted artistic practices? How are urbanism, the built environment, and the unique textures and resonances of the metropolitan area reflected in modern and contemporary artistic production? This discussion-based seminar encourages students to think through the open-ended potential of art to shape global cities and their futures. In the early weeks of the…