The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland explores the art derived from and created about the legendary area that encompasses the American Southwest and portions of Mexico, from long before they were separated by an international border to the present day. Produced to accompany a major exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Road to Aztlan contains nineteen essays by an international team of scholars and artists who investigate the concept of Aztlan as a metaphoric center and allegorical place of origin for the various peoples of the Southwest and Mexico. Cultural interactions between the two areas span three millennia, beginning with the knowledge of maize agriculture, which spread north from Mexico around 1200 B.C. The contributors to this volume explore the relationship between myth and history as expressed in the region's art and material culture, as well as the evolution and persistence of cultural practices over the course of the pre-Columbian, colonial, and contemporary eras.

The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland

History

Zamudio-Taylor, Victor

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Fields, Virginia M.

Americas

Los Angeles County Museum

Published in conjunction with the major exhibition, The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland explores the art derived from and created about the legendary area that encompasses the American Southwest and portions of Mexico long before they were separated by an international border. The book and accompanying exhibition view Aztlan as a metaphoric center and allegorical place of origin for the various peoples of the Southwest and Mexico. Cultural interactions between the two areas span two millennia, beginning with maize cultivation, which spread north from Mexico around BC 1200. The Road to Aztlan also investigates the relationship between myth and history as expressed in art and material culture of the region’s inhabitants over time and the relationship and continuities of cultural practices over the course of the pre-Columbian, colonial, and contemporary eras. Crucial to these changing relationships are aspects of tradition and innovation within cultures as! people sought to negotiate, maintain, and redefine their identities in the face of social disruption. 
Nineteen essays by an international team of scholars and artists including Miguel León-Portilla, Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Polly Schaafsma, Stephen H. Lekson, and Victoria D. Vargas address the issues and concepts that revolve around a sense of place and the dynamic traditions of the past and what that means today.

Frida Kahlo

Few artists have captured the public's imagination with the force of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. During her lifetime, she was best known as the flamboyant wife of celebrated muralist Diego Rivera. Theirs was a tumultuous relationship: Rivera declared himself to be "unfit for fidelity." As if to assuage her pain, Kahlo recorded the vicissitudes of her marriage in paint. She also recorded the misery of her deteriorating health--the orthopedic corsets that she was forced to wear, the numerous spinal surgeries, the miscarriages and therapeutic abortions. The artist's sometimes harrowing imagery is mitigated by an intentional primitivism and small scale, as well as by her sardonic humor and extraordinary imagination. In celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of Kahlo's birth, this major new monograph is published on the occasion of the 2007-08 traveling exhibition. It features the artist's most renowned work--the hauntingly seductive and often brutal self-portraits--as well as a selection of key portraits and still lifes; more than 100 color plates, from Kahlo's earliest works, made in 1926, to her last, in 1954; critical essays by Elizabeth Carpenter, Hayden Herrera and Victor Zamudio-Taylor; and a selection of photographs of Kahlo and Rivera by preeminent photographers of the period, including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Gisele Freund, Tina Modotti and Nickolas Muray. The catalogue also contains snapshots from the artist's own photo albums of Kahlo with family and friends such as André Breton and Leon Trotsky--some of which have never been published, and several of which Kahlo inscribed with dedications, effaced with self-deprecating marks or kissed with a lipstick trace--plus an extensive illustrated timeline, selected bibliography, exhibition history and index.

Herrera, Hayden

Carpenter, Elizabeth

Reference

Walker Art Center

Seduções or Seductions, examines the variety, subtlety and ambiguity of recent Brazilian art. Cildo Meireles, Ernesto Neto and Valeska Soares could scarcely be more different in their choice of materials and formal vocabulary, but nonetheless their work is full of common interests and sensitivities. In "How to Build Cathedrals," Meireles assembles a treasure trove of riches and symbols, including 600,000 coins, 2,000 bones and 800 communion wafers. Neto's "Globiobabel nudelioname landmoonaia," a biomorphic world made of stretchable stocking fabric, conveys intimacy and security. In contrast, Soares's rigorous, Minimalist "Vanishing Point," with its 15 steel tubs, quotes the domesticated nature of Baroque gardens. Conversations with the artists provide personal insights into each work, and explanatory essays put them into a larger context of informative cross-references.

Seduções: Valeska Soares, Cildo Meireles, Ernesto Neto. Installations

Arts & Photography

Moura, Rodrigo

History & Criticism

Hatje Cantz

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