1. How according to Mosquera is Africa inscribed in Wifredo Lam’s work? How is it different from the way it appears in Picasso?
2. How did the Estridentistas participate in the post-revolutionary Modernist project?
3. How and why was the art of the Indigenous cultures of the Americas an inspiration for the Surrealists?
4. How do allegory, populism and ideology function in Mexican Muralism?
5. According to our readings and lectures, what aspects of Cubism did Rivera renounce and what aspects did he maintain in his work?
1. Mosquera sees in Winfred Lam an important change in Latin American Modernism. Discuss at length the critical difference and historical relevance of Lam’s engagement with both the European Avant-Garde and Afro-Caribbean culture. How is his artistic practice inscribed in Modernism from an Afro-Caribbean perspective? If relevant and useful make a comparative analysis with Maya Deren’s film, Divine Horsemen?
2. Describe and discuss elements of Indigenism in the Mexican School, extend your examples to Peru, Uruguay and Brazil. What are the central elements in this Latin American school? What are the contradictions and ambiguities? Explain its persistent recurrence from the XIX century to the Surrealists?
3. How does Diego Rivera appropriate the early avant-garde experiments in cubism and abstraction for the formulation of his original style as part of the Mexican School? What formal elements in composition and technique does he use for generating complex and dense historical and social allegories in his mural works? What are the motifs, subjects and themes that Rivera works and re-works in his murals in Mexico and the United States?
4. Describe and discuss the relationship of the Surrealist Object to the Indigenous artifact? How do these objects function as catalysts for liberation, transformation, revelation and desire? Elaborate on the “subjective” and gendering strategies of surrealist women painters that incorporate them (e.g. Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo and Leonora Carrignton)? How is their relationship to the Indigenous Imaginary and culture different from the epic and populist conception of the Mural Movement?