Diego Rivera’s America, 30 Years of Art at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Conversations with Dr. James Oles at the SFMOMA

Posted on August 3, 2022 by isajubes in Arts, Music, Sports and Entertainment, Radio Show "Atenea Americana", SHOW ENG // 0 Comments

Small part of "The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on This Continent," also known as "Pan American Unity," by Diego Rivera. 1940

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Today we have a conversation from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with Dr. James Oles, guest curator for the exhibition about Diego Rivera’s art from the 1920s to 1940 at the SFMOMA.

Dr. James Oles is a specialist in Latin American art, focusing on modern Mexican art and architecture, through the museum as well as academic projects. His books include South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914-1947 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993); Art and Architecture in Mexico (Thames & Hudson, 2013), the first survey of its kind in some 50 years; and a monograph on the color photographs of Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

Oles is guest curator for Diego Rivera’s America, an in-depth exploration of the artist’s work of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, which opened at the San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMOMA) in July 2022, and travels to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in March 2023.

He edited the fully illustrated scholarly catalog that accompanies this exhibition.

Oles received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1996, and now divides his time between the U.S. and Mexico. He is a senior lecturer in the Art Department at Wellesley College, and in 2002 was appointed adjunct curator of Latin American art at the Davis Museum. In 2019 he organized Art_Latin_America: Against the Survey, featuring 150 works by 100 Latin American and Latinx artists in the permanent collection of the Davis Museum; he also edited a major scholarly catalog for the exhibition. As guest curator, he has organized numerous exhibitions in Mexico and the U.S.

At the lowest level in the museum, there is a free area with the mural “Pan American Unity .” It is also Also known as “The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on This Continent.” This famous mural was painted live in front of an audience of visitors to the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in June 1940. It shows the past, present, and future the artist believes the American continent shared, but also warned of the dangers of military authoritarian governments raging during the war at the time before the US was still not part of WWII. Measuring twenty-two by seventy-four feet and weighing over sixty thousand pounds the mural was moved to the campus of City College of San Francisco (CCSF), restored, and will be exhibited for another 2 years before returning to the City College.

*Pan American Unity*, by Diego Rivera, San Francisco, June 1940. Also known as *The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on This Continent.*

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