What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: http://www.epageflip.net/i/1495540
MARCH 26-APRIL 1, 2023 WHAT'S UP! 9 so looking to these big visions and themes," she says. "In this mural, he uses figures as different allegories for music, for hope and for all of these different ideals that are embodied in individual figures." Alongside the first mural is a series of Rivera's preparatory drawings for the hands and a couple of the heads depicted in the image. The arrangement and positioning of the drawings match the mural and should give viewers a sense of the overall composition of the piece through that assortment of images, Padgett says. In the final mural, a vibrant large-scale production, Rivera uses gold leaf for certain elements on the ceiling, such as hair. Following his first major mural commission, Rivera began to think about Mexican national identity more broadly and examined more closely the regional cultures and traditions in his travels. Among the more formative of those trips was one to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in south Oaxaca. Rivera depicts the traditional dress of the Tehuanas, women of that city, in his works. The women in these scenes are of diverse social and ethnic backgrounds and embrace that by wearing garments that indicate their Indigenous roots. "Tehuana (Aurea Procel)" features a prominent Mexico City doctor in a ceremonial garment that frames her face in white lace. "Dance in Tehuantepec" (1928), an iconic work of Rivera's, is also featured in this exhibition. Situated roughly in the middle of the exhibit are three major paintings by Rivera's wife Frida Kahlo, herself a famous Mexican painter. These paintings were created in San Francisco, and one of them is a self portrait of her standing next to Rivera. Though some may think of Rivera primarily as a muralist, it was his portraits that earned him acclaim first, but that work was responsible for setting him up for the next phase, in murals. One section of the exhibition explores that earlier work, featuring primarily portraits and images of mothers and children. Rivera had a large practice creating individual oil paintings for wealthy collectors, many of whom were in the U.S. "It might not seem like it just by looking at the individual paintings, but this is setting the stage for that … his time in California," Padgett says. The wealthy patrons and their networks were conduits for Rivera receiving mural commissions. One of the portraits that seems to be in a jungle setting was owned by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s wife, an important collector and one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art. She was involved with Rivera's commission for the mural at Rockefeller Center. A couple of videos in the galleries will give greater insights into Rivera's artistic process. In one, an animation lends further detail into the mural making, step by step, from original conception and drawing to grinding of pigments, finishing coats and layers, all the way to the finished project. The other is a historic video of Rivera himself in action. Watching it gives viewers an idea of what a fast painter he was and the collaboration those projects took. By the time you take in Rivera's works of the 1940s, you might notice bigger changes. The images are more indicative of pop culture, with the influence of movies and TV, and stylistically they're quite different. "We can see the murals developing from very simple compositions to increasingly more complex (ones) with more figures, then shifts of scale and time and space," says guest curator James Oles. The best way to understand Rivera's more complicated murals is to internalize that they are not easel paintings. They're not single scenes of anything. "The images are taken from different realities, different spaces and times that have been cut out and pasted together to create a new scene to depict something that no human eye would ever (see naturally)." Rivera came into that collage- style perspective through his time in Paris, in the 1910s, as a cubist. That's where he learned that the modern artist didn't have to resort to roles of Italian Renaissance perspective to create a believable space, Oles says. "That was not the responsibility of the artist, to mirror reality," he says. Essentially these later works are the result of studying lots of things from many perspectives over a longer period of time. "This is multiple realities of multiple times. It's (influenced by) what Rivera's reading, thinking, what's going on in the world, history, films he's watching, archaeology he's studying, his time in San Francisco and Mexico, and taking all those elements to bring them together into one space to see them at once." Re-creating images of hands in a realistic manner is an age-old challenge for artists of all kinds. Rivera created these drawings in preparation for one of his earliest murals. They are arranged in positioning that matches the mural, giving the onlooker a sense of its composition. (NWA Democrat-Gazette/Spencer Tirey) "Diego Rivera's America" features iconic works such as "Nude with Calla Lilies" (1944), shown here on the left. Rivera was known for depicting working class people. Among the elements that drew his attention were huge bundles of flowers like this, shown in some of his most well-known artworks. (NWA Democrat-Gazette/Spencer Tirey)