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.

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.

An insightful biography of the committed and exciting life of the famed Mexican muralist, by an American artist who spent 10 years as his assistant.

In 1931, Diego Rivera was the subject of The Museum of Modern Art's second monographic exhibition, which set attendance records in its five-week run. The Museum brought Rivera to NewYork six weeks before the opening and provided him a studio space in the building. There he produced five 'portable murals' - large blocks of frescoed plaster, slaked lime and wood that feature bold images drawn from Mexican subject matter and address themes of revolution and class inequity. After the opening, to great publicity, Rivera added three more murals, taking on NewYork subjects through monumental images of the urban working class. Published in conjunction with an exhibition that brings together key works from Rivera's 1931 show and related material, this vividly illustrated catalogue casts the artist as a highly cosmopolitan figure who moved between Russia, Mexico and the United States and examines the intersection of art-making and radical politics in the 1930s.

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.

The complete North American work of one of Mexico's greatest muralists. Among the Mexican muralists working in this country during the 1920s and 1930s, including the giants Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the paintings of José Clemente Orozco are arguably the strongest and most politically charged. This important and profusely illustrated volume is proof. From his first commission, Prometheus, at Pamona College and his highly political work at the New School for Social Research in New York to what some feel is his masterpiece, The Epic of American Civilization, at Dartmouth College, Orozco's stinging characterizations of hypocrisy, greed, and oppression challenged conventional conservative views, to such an extent that in certain instances demands were made for the destruction of his works. All of Orozco's North American work is presented here, with discussions on his life and influences as well as his place among the other Mexican artists and his impact on the exuberant art of the 1960s and 1970s.