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Los Días De La Calle Gabino Barreda: The Social Circle Of Remedios Varo And Benjamin Péret In Mexico, 1941-1947, Esther R. Levy May 2023

Los Días De La Calle Gabino Barreda: The Social Circle Of Remedios Varo And Benjamin Péret In Mexico, 1941-1947, Esther R. Levy

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the social circle of Surrealist exiles that formed at the home of Remedios Varo and Benjamin Péret on Calle Gabino Barreda between 1941 and 1947. This group is immortalized in Gunther Gerzso’s painting Los Días de la Calle Gabino Barreda (1944) and includes Gerzso, Varo, Péret, Esteban Francés, and Leonora Carrington. This thesis argues that the environment cultivated on Calle Gabino Barreda provided these artists with a place to expand on what they learned in Europe to develop their Surrealist practice in Mexico.


Making And Taking: Evaluating The Ethnographic Gaze In Graciela Iturbide’S Los Que Viven En La Arena, Lauren Gonzales May 2023

Making And Taking: Evaluating The Ethnographic Gaze In Graciela Iturbide’S Los Que Viven En La Arena, Lauren Gonzales

Theses and Dissertations

Graciela Iturbide’s career-defining engagement with indigenous subjects began with a commission by the Mexican government's Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) to document the Seri people. This thesis contextualizes the resulting photobook, Los que viven en la arena (1981), within the history of indigenous representation in Mexico and the controversial policies of the INI.


Developing Mexico: History, Architecture, Photography, And Esther Born’S The New Architecture In Mexico, Tyler Considine Jan 2023

Developing Mexico: History, Architecture, Photography, And Esther Born’S The New Architecture In Mexico, Tyler Considine

Theses and Dissertations

Esther Born’s The New Architecture in Mexico (1937) presents the first survey of Mexican modern architecture and documents early works by Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, among other Mexican modernists. This thesis examines Born’s architectural photography alongside that of Lola Álvarez Bravo, Guillermo Kahlo, and other photographers and within discourses of modernity, history, and representation.


Realisms And The Body After War: Document, Truth, And Critique In Postrevolutionary Mexico And Weimar Germany, Eliana Blechman Jan 2023

Realisms And The Body After War: Document, Truth, And Critique In Postrevolutionary Mexico And Weimar Germany, Eliana Blechman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines realisms and representations of the body in postrevolutionary Mexico, using the critical framework surrounding Neue Sachlichkeit and post-World War I Weimar society as a comparative model. Through imagery of soldiers, women, and class disparity, artists utilized realisms to relay record, suggest truth, and create criticism.


Entre El Suelo Y Lo Demas, Maria Jose Garcia Estevez May 2022

Entre El Suelo Y Lo Demas, Maria Jose Garcia Estevez

Theses and Dissertations

My intention is to generate a narrative that challenges the idea of place as a fixed space, a precarious equilibrium experienced through material amalgamations- a constant shift between a recognizable belonging and a casi como o así como place.


Boundary As Borderland: Mexico City’S Central Plaza And The Politics Of Presence, Re'al Christian Dec 2021

Boundary As Borderland: Mexico City’S Central Plaza And The Politics Of Presence, Re'al Christian

Theses and Dissertations

In the postcolonial era, the land surrounding national borders—the borderland—has inherited a specific identity and relationship with those who navigate it. While national borderlands are oft discussed amid conversations on globalization, land disputes, and war, the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the new establishment of borderlands from within in the form of segregative boundaries that purported to separate Indigenous and European peoples. This thesis concerns the manifestation of the borderland as not only an external entity, but an internal one as well. Using Mexico City, the center of the Spanish colonial empire, as …


Plastic, Pollution, Art, And The Caribbean, Celine Collazo Dec 2021

Plastic, Pollution, Art, And The Caribbean, Celine Collazo

Theses and Dissertations

The impact of a growing ocean pollution problem can be seen on the trash-filled shores of Caribbean beaches. Through a contextualization of the work of three artists, Tony Capellán, Radamés ‘Juni’ Figueroa, and Alejandro Durán, this paper discusses the cause and effects of such detritus, and possibilities for change.


Interrogating The Light Bugs, Ana C. Villagomez Dec 2021

Interrogating The Light Bugs, Ana C. Villagomez

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings engage with ideas of time, memory and displacement. Intricately painted works appear to cover other layers of information hidden underneath through the act of rubbing, masking and erasing with unconventional tools such as scour pads, toilet brushes and rags, creating a surface that resembles a complex topographical map. But unlike a traditional cartographer, I seek to map my inner world.


Yankee Go Home: Roci In Latin America, Vitoria Hadba May 2021

Yankee Go Home: Roci In Latin America, Vitoria Hadba

Theses and Dissertations

In 1984, at an event hosted by the United Nations, American artist Robert Rauschenberg announced his most ambitious and controversial project to date: the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange—or ROCI. Blending primary source documents with social art history, I retrace the artist’s steps—and missteps—during the first leg of his tour through Mexico, Chile, and Venezuela. This thesis investigates the convoluted political implications of ROCI in Latin America during the transitional period in which binary Cold War politics were ebbing amidst the rise of a global free-market economy.


Mexican Modernism’S Other: The Contemporáneos, Gender, And National Identity, 1920–1940, Joseph S. Shaikewitz May 2020

Mexican Modernism’S Other: The Contemporáneos, Gender, And National Identity, 1920–1940, Joseph S. Shaikewitz

Theses and Dissertations

In postrevolutionary Mexico, a group of artists known as the Contemporáneos redefined the parameters of modernism through personal expressions of otherness and difference. This thesis examines works by artists including Abraham Ángel, Julio Castellanos, María Izquierdo, and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano in relation to shifting discourses surrounding gender and national identity.


The Villa Baizeau And The Casa O’Gorman: The Modern House In 1929 Through Two Case Studies, Nora L. Boyd May 2019

The Villa Baizeau And The Casa O’Gorman: The Modern House In 1929 Through Two Case Studies, Nora L. Boyd

Theses and Dissertations

Using as case studies two houses designed and built in the years 1928-1931 in Mexico City and Tunis, which early scholars connected to the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, this study illuminates inherent biases in architectural history and proposes a more historically rigorous framework, reoriented around individual buildings rather than architects.


Contesting Representations Of Gender And Womanhood In Mexico The Photomontages Of Lola Álvarez Bravo, 1935–1958, Alana Hernandez Jan 2018

Contesting Representations Of Gender And Womanhood In Mexico The Photomontages Of Lola Álvarez Bravo, 1935–1958, Alana Hernandez

Theses and Dissertations

Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903–1993), a Mexican photographer, photojournalist, portraitist, and teacher created approximately thirty photomontages during the span of her fifty-year career. This thesis argues that Álvarez Bravo turned to photomontage during targeted periods of her career in order to contest and challenge prevailing discourses on motherhood and femininity. A close analysis of eight photomontages produced between 1935 to the last printed in 1958 make evident the manifold ways Álvarez Bravo represented gender as a contested, political, and personal concern.


Ya Me Voy (I’M Leaving Now), Lindsey Cordero Camp Dec 2016

Ya Me Voy (I’M Leaving Now), Lindsey Cordero Camp

Theses and Dissertations

Ya Me Voy (I’m Leaving Now) is 54-minute documentary about Felipe, an undocumented Mexican living in Brooklyn who struggles over whether to return home to Mexico. Felipe plans to reunite with his family in Mexico and reconnect with his youngest son, César, who was just 8 months old when Felipe left. When he discovers his oldest son has a serious debt with the bank, however, he is forced to postpone his return in order to help his son pay off the debt. Felipe feels lonely, disappointed and betrayed by his family until one day an unexpected love affair makes him …