VIDA AMERICANA: MEXICAN MURALISTS REMAKE AMERICAN ART, 1925–1945 at the Whitney Museum.

The radical cultural transformation Mexico underwent at the end of its Revolution in 1920 established a new relationship between art and the public, giving rise to an art that spoke directly to the people about social justice and national life. The model galvanized artists in the United States who were seeking to break free of European aesthetic domination and create a publicly significant and accessible native art. Numerous American artists traveled to Mexico, and the leading Mexican muralists—José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—spent extended periods of time in the United States, where they executed murals, paintings, and prints, exhibited their work, and interacted with local artists. With approximately 250 works by eighty Mexican and American artists, this exhibition will demonstrate the impact Mexican artists had on their counterparts in the United States during this period and the ways in which their example inspired American artists to create epic narratives about American history and everyday life and to use their art to protest economic, social, and racial injustices.