Identity + history of Street Art @Groundswell (Voices Her'd Program)

Los Tres Grandes

Diego Rivera / Jose Clemente Orozco / David Alfaro Siqueiros

Mexican muralism: art project initially funded by the Mexican government in the immediate wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) to depict Mexico's past, present, and future, transforming the walls of many public buildings to reshape Mexicans' understanding of the nation's history. The government-backed mural project had social, political, and historical messages in an effort to create a sense of nationalism and promote the inclusion of the masses in political and social ideologies. The newly formed government sought to establish a national identity that eschewed Eurocentrism (an emphasis on European culture) and instead heralded the Amerindian. The result was that Indigenous culture was elevated in the national discourse. After hundreds of years of colonial rule and the Eurocentric dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, the new Mexican state integrated its national identity with the concept of indigenismo, an ideology that lauded Mexico’s past Indigenous history and cultural heritage (rather than acknowledging the ongoing struggles of contemporary Indigenous people and incorporating them into the new state governance).

"Every strong artist has been a propagandist. I want to be a propagandist and I want to be nothing else. I want to be a propagandist of Communism and I want to be it in all that I can think, in all that I can speak, in all that I can write, and in all that I can paint. I want to use my art as a weapon."  - Diego Rivera

Aaron Douglas

1899 - 1979

Douglas created this series of murals to support the conversation started during the Harlem Renaissance + into the Great Depression about what it meant to be a Black American - inspired by Alain Locke's powerful reimagining of what that identity looks like through a cultural lens, and movements like Mexican Muralism. These murals were commissioned by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1936 - along with a number of well-known artists from American History.