cease being luxury objects and transform themselves into a factor within the class struggle; they ought to evolve socially and participate directly in the revolutionary struggle." This is the only time that Izquierdo argued for group action. Izquierdo's paintings, give us a deconstruction of 'heroic' Mexican nationalism using the marginalized identity of the female on two distinct levels: (1) the more conventional one of protesting social discrimination against women, and more intriguingly (2) as a hinge point for a variety of pictorial explorations. Later works Izquierdo painted at least twelve ofrendas between 1940 and 1948. Some of the paintings are populated with toys, sweets, and crafts related to popular Mexican heritage and Catholic occasions. Viernes de Dolores, like her other paintings in this series, faithfully captures the customary contents of Mexican Catholic home altars. The altar is erected on ascending tiers, and the shelves are lined with papel picado, a traditional Mexican craft of hand-cut, brightly colored paper. Local pottery, wares, fruits, and flowers signify the products of the land and the people of Mexico, as they do throughout Mexican post-colonial and modern art. One of Izquierdo's earliest explorations of the cabinet motif came in her Alacena of 1942. "Trigo crecido" (Growing Wheat), from 1940, presents objects and symbols with distinct local and traditional significance through a transnational modernist vocabulary. Usually grouped with Izquierdo's series of domestic interior tableaux, Trigo crecido was the first home altar that she painted. A late domestic cabinet composition from 1952, La alacena (Viernes de jugueteria ), comes full circle back to Izquierdo's home altars of the previous decade. By titling the work Viernes de jugueteria (Toy Store Friday), Izquierdo playfully connected the painting to the Viernes de Dolores altar series. The composition includes elements typically found in her altars, such as the drawn lace curtains, extinguished candles, toy figurines, and papel picado. Naturaleza viva con huachinango, painted in 1946 by Maria Izquierdo, countered the Muralists' view of Mexican identity with a vision deeply opposed to it. In contrast to the Muralists' images of human and class struggle, this landscape contains no overt human presence. Human activity is in manifested in windowless, abandoned buildings and untouched food set out for unknown, unimagined diners - an ironic and absurd display of abundance which only serves to point out the poverty of the surrounding landscape. One of the last paintings Izquierdo completed was Sueño y premonición (Dream