Diego Rivera and Post Revolutionary Mexican Art

Paying homage to Walter Anderson’s bicycle journeys across Texas into Mexico in the mid-twentieth century,  this talk will explore Diego Rivera’s depictions of rural Mexican agrarian practices in the 1920s and 30s. In particular, we will focus on the subject of the “campesino,” a type of rural laborer thrust into the visual spotlight of postrevolutionary Mexican politics by Rivera and his contemporaries. We will consider individual works by Rivera, as well as bigger questions about how Mexican art made its way into the U.S. popular imagination in the early 20th century—at a time when Anderson was beginning to hone his creative practice.

Lesley A. Wolff, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Art and Design at The University of Tampa, specializing in modern and contemporary global art history and museum studies. Her interdisciplinary research on foodways, heritage, and the visual cultures of the Americas has appeared in various international publications. She is co-editor of the volume Nourish and Resist: Food and Feminisms in Contemporary Global Caribbean Art (Yale University Press, 2024) and her single-authored monograph, Culinary Palettes: Heritage as Food in Postrevolutionary Mexican Art, is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press (2025). Her publications at the intersections of food and art of the Americas have appeared in journals such as Food, Culture & Society (2018), African and Black Diaspora (2019), Humanities (2021), and Gender & History (2022), among others. Wolff is also a curator committed to engaging decolonial histories of the art of the Americas. Her current exhibition, The Kingdom of This World, Reimagined, is on view in Pittsburgh through March 2024.

Admission is FREE: Sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council