Zoom webinar for Sustaining, Contemporaries Council, and Director's Circle members
Whitney Museum Curator Barbara Haskell will discuss her current exhibition, Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945. Mexico underwent a radical cultural transformation at the end of its Revolution in 1920. A new relationship between art and the public was established, giving rise to 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 to create 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, executing murals, paintings, and prints; exhibiting their work; and interacting with local artists. This exhibition reorients art history by revealing the profound impact the Mexican muralists had on their counterparts in the United States during this period and the ways in which their example inspired American artists both to create epic narratives about American history and everyday life and to use their art to protest economic, social, and racial injustices.
BARBARA HASKELL is a long-time curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a well-known scholar on American modern art, and author of over thirty publications. Among the landmark thematic exhibitions she has curated are The American Century: Art & Culture 1900–1950 (1999), BLAM! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism and Performance 1958–1964 (1984), and Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945 (2020). In addition, she has curated retrospectives and authored accompanying scholarly monographs on a range of early-twentieth-century and post-war American artists, including H. C. Westermann (1978), Marsden Hartley (1980), Milton Avery (1982), Ralston Crawford (1985), Charles Demuth (1987), Red Grooms (1987), Donald Judd (1988), Burgoyne Diller (1990), Agnes Martin (1992), Joseph Stella (1994), Edward Steichen (2000), Elie Nadelman (2003), Oscar Bluemner (2005), Georgia O'Keeffe (2009), Lyonel Feininger (2011), Robert Indiana (2013), Stuart Davis (2016), and Grant Wood (2018). In 2003, she was awarded the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.