Title: All You Need to Know About Mexican Muralism and Muralists | Widewalls
Headings: All You Need to Know About Mexican Muralism and Muralists
All You Need to Know About Mexican Muralism and Muralists
June 17, 2016
Mexican Muralism - Hand-in-Hand with Politics and People
Mural - The Characteristics and Significance
Los Tres Grandes - The Three Great Muralists of Mexico
Diego Rivera
José Clemente Orozco
David Alfaro Siqueiros
Video - Most Important Mexican Muralists of the Muralist Arts Movement
The Influence and Legacy
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The Influence and Legacy
As one of the most important movements of public art and the arts of the 20th century in general, Mexican muralism had the main role in bringing mural painting back as a respected and wide-spread artistic form with a strong social intent. Its ideas also found their way to other parts of the Americas, like Guatemala, Ecuador and Brazil. But perhaps the movement’s greatest influence can be seen in the United States, where many Mexican muralists spent time and created seminal paintings, including los tres grandes who practically paved the way for other artists to come and work there. Orozco was the first to make murals there in the late 1920s, at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and later in San Francisco and New York as well. Diego Rivera left some important pieces in Detroit, while Siqueiros’s most notable paintings are still on the walls in Los Angeles. Mexican muralists also served as an inspiration for the Works Progress Administration program introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, whose 1933 Public Works of Art Project saw 3600 artists create murals and sculptures for public buildings across the United States. Although their depictions weren’t political, the intention to make art public and accessible to all remained the same. Mexican muralism also helped the creation of the Chicano movement, established by Mexican-American artists in the 1960s who wanted to form their own aesthetics in the country and to illustrate their own struggles and social issues. Needless to say that the revolutionary mural painting of Mexico opened many doors for the street art and graffiti movement of today, in South America and beyond, as it proposed public art as a legitimate form of arti