Murals, those giant works of art across walls, are a long-standing tradition of Mexico and Latin America.
An Ideafest event, Latin American Muralism and Identity, on Tuesday will take visitors on a discussion of murals and the links they are providing to Latin America culture at the University of Victoria.
The event will use the large paintings/murals inside the Clearihue Building, completed last fall, to demonstrate the artists’ aim to achieve deep, subtle connections with Latin American culture.
UVic history professor Beatriz de Alba-Koch, director of Latin American studies, said most people are familiar with the murals that decorate public buildings, most notably in Mexico.
In a telephone interview, she said artists such as Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Altaro Siquieros are famous for their narrative depictions of Mexican political emancipation from Spain and political revolutions and progress.
“All the public buildings, at the state level or the national level, will have their histories depicted in grandiloquent images on their sides,” said de Alba-Koch, laughing.
“It’s not necessarily historically accurate, but it was the artist’s view or the story the government wanted told,” she said.
But she also said the Clearihue murals, really large separate panels, were an attempt to reach beyond a historical narrative to reach deeper cultural elements of the peoples living in Mexico or Latin America.
For a start, a cultural observer willing to go back centuries before the Spanish conquests would find the Mayans and the Aztecs painting and enjoying large exterior artworks.
So de Alba-Koch said she was delighted and surprised when Canadian artist Kay Gallivan, commissioned to do the Clearihue paintings, said she was reluctant to attempt a typical narrative of Latin American history.
Instead, she wanted to evoke patterns found in the weaving of Indigenous Mexican and Latin American women.
“Kay was very careful, almost self-effacing, and just said: ‘Well, I’m a Canadian artist and I’m just going to enlarge something another woman has done,’ ” de Alba-Koch said.
Meanwhile, Mexican artist Abraham Leon Perez collaborated and responded with his own depictions of flowers seen woven on the blouses of women in the Oaxaca region of Mexico and other images loved by Mexican Indigenous Peoples.
De Alba-Koch said she was delighted with the resulting paintings in Clearihue, which are already a focal point on campus for Latin-American-related activities.
People familiar with Mexico and the southern Americas will recognize the patterns, flowers and animals depicted in the murals. Those who aren’t familiar can learn and gain a little introduction to deep-rooted elements of Mexican and Latin American culture.
The Clearihue mural speaks of Mexico and Latin America but without the explicit political messages so often encountered in post-revolutionary cultures, notably those created in the 1920s and 1930s.
“It [the Clearihue mural] is saying a lot but it’s a different narrative than the state narrative or even an artist’s view of the state narrative,” said de Alba-Koch.
Latin American Muralism and Identity is from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesday, March 5, in the Clearihue Building, Room A118.
To learn more about Ideafest events, go to uvic.ca/ideafest.
