Modern Art and Architecture Commons^™

Remedios Varo: Peregrinaciones, Julia Condes

Honors Undergraduate Theses

At the time of her death, the artist Remedios Varo (1908–1963) left behind over 500 works of art, the majority of which were created in her adopted country of Mexico. Known for her meticulously crafted fantastical paintings, Varo underwent exile and displacement due to first the Spanish Civil War, and later World War II, which led her to relocate to Mexico, where she would create prolifically for the remainder of her life. This paper will examine the effect of those experiences on the artist and the work she produced, attesting to Varo’s ability to translate complex emotions regarding the human …

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

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

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

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.

Re-Imagining Design For Affordable Housing In Mexico, Kenza Fernandez Dominguez

Scripps Senior Theses

Since the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, affordable housing developments in Mexico have been produced in a massive, unsustainable scale. The speed at which these developments are produced equates to the carelessness that goes into their planning. At large, the developments’ monotonous design is aesthetically dehumanizing and fails to promote a sense of community. These developments lack basic infrastructure, and their residents have abandoned them, which has incentivized increased criminal activity.

In this paper, I will be looking at successful models of affordable housing globally, exploring the histories of communal living, and function of architectural collages. Based on my findings, …

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 …

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

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

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.

Voz Alta: The Sound Of A Collective Memory, Sarah E. Kleinman

Graduate Research Posters

Voz Alta is a participatory, voice-activated public light installation designed by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer as a memorial for the Tlatelolco massacre, which occurred on October 2, 1968 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, Mexico. In the Plaza, Lozano-Hemmer has synchronized a megaphone with a 10 kW Xenon robotic searchlight. As each participant speaks into the megaphone, the searchlight shines to the uppermost floor of the towering Centro Cultural Tlatelolco (CCT) building where three additional searchlights instantaneously strobe, dim, and brighten, illuminating the nocturnal landscape in horizontally fixed, tangential beams. Although the aesthetic, social, historical, and political aspects of …

Nationalism: A Search For Unity, The Role Of The Mexican Government In Sponsoring Contemporary Fine Arts, Katharine Ferris Nutt

History ETDs

The following discussion is in part the history of nationalism in the fine arts of Mexico, as a spontaneous expression and as one artificially stimulated. Of equal concern, however, are the State's endeavors to channel nationalism by controlling the bellas artes through subsidy, decree, and law, and finally by the creation of a national institute or theater. The writer has endeavored to reveal both the advantageous and disadvantageous aspects of the government's control and to render some idea as to the extent to which cultural nationalism may forge permanent unity among the Mexicans.