ARTH 398 Special Topic in Art & Society: Post-revolutionary and Contemporary Mexican Art

• Instructor: Dr. Nuria Carton de Grammont  

This course expands students’ understanding of 20th- and 21st-century Mexican art, offering an overview of post-revolutionary and contemporary artistic production. We will explore the role of nationalism in shaping post-revolutionary visual culture and examine the confrontational aesthetics of the Mexican avant-garde, including movements such as Stridentism and Surrealism. The course will trace the evolution of these practices through the rise of the “contracultura” during the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, focusing on key figures and collectives such as the People’s Graphic Workshop (Taller de Gráfica Popular) and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Panic Movement. We will investigate how institutional spaces—museums, galleries, and art schools—responded to the emergence of socially engaged urban interventions during the 1970s and 1980s. These practices, known collectively as “los grupos”, laid the groundwork for the Neo-Mexicanist movement, which marked a renewed search for cultural identity in Mexican art. In the second half of the course, we will engage with contemporary Mexican art, analyzing its relationship to current political, economic, and social issues, including drug-related violence, immigration, urbanization, and the impact of neoliberal policies. The course will also include an introduction to the Chicano Art Movement in the United States and examine how Latino-Canadian artistic production is gaining visibility within the Canadian national art scene. Throughout the course, we will approach these themes through the lens of postcolonial theory and gender discourse, encouraging critical analysis of how Mexican and diasporic identities are constructed and challenged through art.