The lifework of one of the finest Mexican muralists is fully illuminated here, capturing a full range of the politically charged images he created while living in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s.

Looks at the life and career of the Mexican mural painter.

Exhibition schedule: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College: April 7-June 17, 2012; Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center [East Hampton, NY]: August 2-October 27, 2012.

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.

Volume covers the Collection of Prints and Illustrated Books, not the collection of artists' books.

Examines the introduction of Mexican muralism to the United States in the 1930s, and the challenges faced by the artists, their medium, and the political overtones of their work in a new society.

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.