“A lucid—at times, even poetic—summary of five hundred years of Mexican art. The illustrated works of art are well-chosen and beautifully integrated into Oles’s text. Indeed, it feels as if his words emanate from the art itself.” –Donna Pierce, Denver Art Museum This new interpretive history of Mexican art from the Spanish Conquest to the early decades of the twenty-first century is the most comprehensive introduction to the subject in fifty years. James Oles ranges widely across media and genres, offering new readings of painting, sculpture, architecture, prints, and photographs. He interprets major works by such famous artists as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, but also discusses less familiar figures in history and landscape painting, muralism, and conceptual art. The story of Mexican art is set in its rich historical context by the book’s treatment of political and social change. The author draws on recent scholarship to examine crucial issues of race, class, and gender, including the work of indigenous artists during the colonial period, and of women artists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Throughout, Oles shows how Mexican artists participated in local and international developments. He considers both native and foreign-born artists, from Baroque architects to kinetic sculptors, and highlights the important role played by Mexicans in the global art scene of the last five centuries.

The first major work in English on Mathias Goeritz (1915-1990), this book illuminates the artist's pivotal role within the landscape of twentieth-century modernism. Goeritz became recognized as an abstract sculptor after arriving in Mexico from Germany by way of Spain in 1949. His call to integrate abstract forms into civic and religious architecture, outlined in his "Emotional Architecture" manifesto, had a transformative impact on midcentury Mexican art and design. While best known for the experimental museum El Eco and his collaborations with the architect Luis Barrag n, including the brightly colored towers of Satellite City, Goeritz also shaped the Bauhaus-inspired curriculum at Guadalajara's School of Architecture and the iconic Cultural Program of Mexico City's 1968 Olympic Games. Josten addresses the Cold War implications of these and other initiatives that pitted Goeritz, an advocate of internationalist abstraction, against Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, ardent defenders of the realist style that prevailed in official Mexican art during the postrevolutionary period. Exploring Goeritz's dialogues with leading figures among the Parisian and New York avant-gardes, such as Yves Klein and Philip Johnson, Josten shows how Goeritz's approach to modernism, which was highly attuned to politics and place, formed part of a global enterprise.

Mexico City became one of the centers of architectural modernism in the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. Invigorated by insights drawn from the first published histories of Mexican colonial architecture, which suggested that Mexico possessed a distinctive architecture and culture, beginning in the 1920s a new generation of architects created profoundly visual modern buildings intended to convey Mexico's unique cultural character. By midcentury these architects and their students had rewritten the country's architectural history and transformed the capital into a metropolis where new buildings that evoked pre-conquest, colonial, and International Style architecture coexisted. Through an exploration of schools, a university campus, a government ministry, a workers' park, and houses for Diego Rivera and Luis Barragan, Kathryn O'Rourke offers a new interpretation of modern architecture in the Mexican capital, showing close links between design, evolving understandings of national architectural history, folk art, and social reform. This book demonstrates why creating a distinctively Mexican architecture captivated architects whose work was formally dissimilar, and how that concern became central to the profession.

A Guide to Mexican Art, a survey of more than twenty centuries of art, has a double purpose. It provides an ample version of one of the great national arts by a leading art historian, and it serves simultaneously as a practical guide to the art's outstanding masterpieces. The Guide will thus be of value to specialists and students of Latin American art and to sightseers as an introduction and guide to the art and architecture of Mexico. To facilitate its use for the latter purpose, Professor Fernández has based his exposition on the sensitive analysis of works to be found almost exclusive in museums and public buildings accessible to the tourist. The book was originally published in Spanish in 1958 and revised in 1961. This English translation, from the second edition has been brought up to date by the author and translator.

Since the mid 1970s, there has been an extraordinary renewal of interest in early modern architecture, both as a way of gaining insight into contemporary architectural culture and as a reaction to neoconservative postmodernism. This book undertakes a critical reappraisal of the notion of modernity in Mexican architecture and its influence on a generation of Mexican architects whose works spanned the 1920s through the 1960s. Nine essays by noted architects and architectural historians cover a range of topics from broad-based critical commentaries to discussions of individual architects and buildings. Among the latter are the architects Enrique del Moral, Juan O'Gorman, Carlos Obregón Santacilia, Juan Segura, Mario Pani, and the campus and stadium of the Ciudad Universitaria in Mexico City. Relatively little has been published in English regarding this era in Mexican architecture. Thus, Modernity and the Architecture of Mexico will play a groundbreaking role in making the underlying assumptions, ideological and political constructs, and specific architect's agendas known to a wide audience in the humanities. Likewise, it should inspire greater appreciation for this undervalued body of works as an important contribution to the modern movement.

The first of two histories written in English on Mexican architecture in the entire colonial period, Early's book sheds new light for North Americans on the diverse and changing society of the scene of colonial New Spain.

Borderwall as public space / Teddy Cruz -- Ronald Rael -- Pilgrims at the wall / Marcello Di Cintio -- Borderwall as architecture / Ronald rael -- Transborderisms / Norma Iglesias-Prieto -- Recuerdos / Ronald Rael -- Why walls don't work / Michael Dear -- Afterwards / Ronald Rael