ARTH 398 Special Topics in Art and Society: 100 Years of Mexican Art

• Mondays, 6:00pm-8:15pm
• Online: Access through Moodle
• Instructor: Dr. Nuria Carton de Grammont

This course proposes to expand students’ understanding and knowledge of twentieth-century Mexican art through an overview of modern 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. We will discuss how to understand these various forms of artistic practice in relation to (and at times how they worked against) the country’s art historical canon. We will follow with the rise of “contracultura,” or anti-culture, during the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, as well as ask how institutional spaces, such as museums and galleries, responded to the rise of socially engaged, urban interventions during the 1970s. 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 drug-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.