ARTH 40.04 Mexicanidad: Constructing and Dismantling Mexican National Identity
Since the Mexican Revolution (1910-17), artists, intellectuals, and state-actors have endeavored to define and re-define Mexican national identity, or what is known as Mexicanidad. From the 1920s and 30s, when an emphasis was placed on Mexico’s rural and indigenous populations to the 1940s and 50s, when greater attention was given to Mexican modernization, through the years after 1968, when artists and intellectuals endeavored to reveal the repressive nature of Mexicanidad and its role in propagandizing an authoritarian state and ruling party. In this course we will place artists like José Clemente Orozco and Frida Kahlo within a broader visual cultural context that includes not only mural art and painting, but also sculpture, architecture, printmaking, photography, installation, film, and performance. We will cover art produced in Mexico from the turn of the 20th century through the “boom” years of the 1990s, with a focus on issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality throughout. Students will learn about the history of Mexican art, enhance skills in the visual analysis of modern and contemporary art, refine their ability to conduct original research and write effectively, and develop an understanding of how visual culture participates in the construction of national identity as well as how art can critique and queer that construction. This course has no pre-requisites and requires no prior knowledge of Art History or Mexican art and history.
Instructor
Coffey
Cross Listed Courses
LACS 30.09