ARTH 398 Special Topic in Art & Society: Post-revolutionary and Contemporary Mexican Art

• Mondays, 5:45 - 8:15pm
• Instructor: Dr. Nuria Carton de Grammont  

This course proposes to expand students’ understanding and knowledge of 20st and 21st century Mexican art through an overview of post-revolutionary and contemporary Mexican artistic production. Students will learn about the reaffirmation of nationalism in the construction of a post-revolutionary visual culture and the confrontational role of the Mexican avant-garde such as Stridentism and Surrealism. We will follow on how to understand these various forms of artistic practice with the rise of “contracultura,” or anti-culture, during the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City with the role of the People’s Graphic Workshop and Jodorovsky’s Panic movement. We will discuss how institutional spaces, such as museums and galleries, responded to the rise of socially engaged, urban interventions during the 1970s and 1980s. Such practices, also known collectively as “los grupos,” marked an important precedent to the subsequent turn in Mexican art, the “Neo-Mexicanist” movement, proposing a new search for Mexican cultural identity. We will examine the contemporary Mexican art production and its relation to current political, economic and social issues, such as war on drugs related violence, immigration, the urban growth and the consequences of neo-liberal policies. The course will include an overview of the Chicano Art movement in the USA as well as of the Latino-Canadian art production and the way this thriving movement is gaining grounds in the national art scene.