Mary K. Coffey – författare

A public art movement initiated by the postrevolutionary state, Mexican muralism has long been admired for its depictions of popular struggle and social justice. Mary K. Coffey revises traditional accounts of Mexican muralism by describing how a radical art movement was transformed into official culture, ultimately becoming a tool of state propaganda. Analyzing the incorporation of mural art into Mexico's most important public museums-the Palace of Fine Arts, the National History Museum, and the National Anthropology Museum-Coffey illuminates the institutionalization of muralism and the political and aesthetic issues it raised. She focuses on the period between 1934, when JosÉ Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera were commissioned to create murals in the Palace of Fine Arts, through the crisis of state authority in the 1960s. Coffey highlights a reciprocal relationship between Mexico's mural art and its museums. Muralism shaped exhibition practices, which affected the politics, aesthetics, and reception of mural art. Interpreting the iconography of Mexico's murals, she focuses on representations of mestizo identity, the preeminent symbol of postrevolutionary Mexico. Coffey argues that those gendered representations reveal a national culture project more invested in race and gender inequality than in race and class equality.

Shedding fresh light on modern art beyond the West, this text introduces readers to artists, art movements, debates and theoretical positions of the modern era that continue to shape contemporary art worldwide.  Area histories of modern art are repositioned and interconnected towards a global art historiography.   Provides a much-needed corrective to the Eurocentric historiography of modern art, offering a more worldly and expanded view than any existing modern art surveyBrings together a selection of major essays and historical documents from a wide range of sourcesSection introductions, critical essays, and documents provide the relevant contextual and historiographical material, link the selections together, and guide the reader through the key theoretical positions and debatesOffers a useful tool for students and scholars with little or no prior knowledge of non-Western modernismsIncludes many contrasting voices in its documents and essays, encouraging reader response and lively classroom discussionIncludes a selection of major essays and historical documents addressing not only painting and sculpture but photography, film and architecture as well.

Shedding fresh light on modern art beyond the West, this text introduces readers to artists, art movements, debates and theoretical positions of the modern era that continue to shape contemporary art worldwide.  Area histories of modern art are repositioned and interconnected towards a global art historiography.   Provides a much-needed corrective to the Eurocentric historiography of modern art, offering a more worldly and expanded view than any existing modern art surveyBrings together a selection of major essays and historical documents from a wide range of sourcesSection introductions, critical essays, and documents provide the relevant contextual and historiographical material, link the selections together, and guide the reader through the key theoretical positions and debatesOffers a useful tool for students and scholars with little or no prior knowledge of non-Western modernismsIncludes many contrasting voices in its documents and essays, encouraging reader response and lively classroom discussionIncludes a selection of major essays and historical documents addressing not only painting and sculpture but photography, film and architecture as well.

Between 1932 and 1934, JosÉ Clemente Orozco painted the twenty-four-panel mural cycle entitled The Epic of American Civilization in Dartmouth College's Baker-Berry Library. An artifact of Orozco's migration from Mexico to the United States, the Epic represents a turning point in his career, standing as the only fresco in which he explores both US-American and Mexican narratives of national history, progress, and identity. While his title invokes the heroic epic form, the mural indicts history as complicit in colonial violence. It questions the claims of Manifest Destiny in the United States and the Mexican desire to mend the wounds of conquest in pursuit of a postcolonial national project. In Orozco's American Epic Mary K. Coffey places Orozco in the context of his contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and demonstrates the Epic's power as a melancholic critique of official indigenism, industrial progress, and Marxist messianism. In the process, Coffey finds within Orozco's work a call for justice that resonates with contemporary debates about race, immigration, borders, and nationality.