Routes and Networks of Mexican Abstraction Across the Americas (1958-1970)

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the emergence and consolidation of abstract practices in Mexico City, exercised by a collective of artists driven by collaboration, intermediality, and experimentation, as an alternative to Muralism. In reevaluating the 1960s generation of artists, historically assessed by their rejection of social realism, this project highlights their evolving dialogues with Muralism and their negotiations with local and transnational institutions. Through analysis of cultural policies, museum studies, and Cold War-era politics, I explore the emergence of abstraction and other postwar avant-garde movements as the new language of modernity. Close study of cultural projects, exhibitions, and artist-led initiatives—such as the Mexican pavilions at the 1960s World Fairs, Mexico City’s Inter-American Biennial, and the Salón Independiente—reveals the rich hemispheric routes that shaped postwar Mexican art and, moreover, repositions its contributions to the construction of “Latin American art.” Contextualized in a historical moment of economic prosperity known as the Milagro Mexicano, abstraction both enabled artists’ individual expression and contested the state’s univocal definition of national art.

Through an analysis of an emerging network of artists, art critics, new museums and galleries, local and international exhibitions, mass media, and cultural policies, I argue that the 1960s intelligentsia systematically drew Mexican art into international spaces and, in so doing, challenged Muralism’s claim as the only acceptable national style. By including projects sponsored by institutions in Washington, D.C., Lima, and São Paulo, this dissertation reevaluates the contributions of Mexican abstraction to Latin American (and global) modernisms. These initiatives reveal the complexity surrounding both artistic creation under the oversight of the Mexican state and the integration of abstraction at home and abroad. The participation of the 1960s generation of artists in state-sponsored events exposed their ambivalent relationship with officialdom as well as their collective efforts to democratize cultural spaces. By illuminating these networks of artistic exchange that stretched across the Americas, this dissertation contributes new scholarship on the histories of Latin American and abstract art.