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Under the Stars *

Thursday, Sept. 27th, 7pm *

El Pueblo – 424 No. Main Street-Father Serra Park *

Gregorio Luke, an expert in Mexican and Latin American art and culture, presents his popular outdoor multimedia show that looks at the life and work of David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Special appearance by NewsEmmy winner and Los Angeles native Rick Garcia from KCAL 9. Rick Garcia has received the National Hispanic Media Coalition’s Excellence in Broadcast Journalism award.

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Letters to Siqueiros *

Thursday, Oct. 4th, 7pm *

El Pueblo – 424 No. Main Street – Pico House *

Award-winning filmmaker and author Jesus Treviño will screen América Tropical, his 1971 documentary about David Alfaro Siqueiros. He will be joined by three Chicano muralists (Wayne Healy, Barbara Carrasco, John Valadez) each reading a letter to Siqueiros describing his impact on them personally and in their work, a letter none had the opportunity to send to Siqueiros during his lifetime.

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Siqueiros in Los Angeles *

Friday, Oct. 5th, 7pm *

El Pueblo – 424 No. Main Street – Pico House *

Celebrated author, historian, and Siqueiros expert Dr. Irene Herner Reiss will present a lecture about the time Siqueiros spent in Los Angeles and the roll of the mural as a cultural artifact in a city where the past is often forgotten.

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Saturday, October 20 and Saturday, October 27, 2012 – 9 am to 1 pm

Continuing the Siqueiros Legacy: A Mural Tour of Eastside LA

Departs from América Tropical Interpretive Center

El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument,  125 Paseo de la Plaza, entrance on Olvera Street *

$20, $10 students; Reservations available as of September  20, 2012. For more information visit www.getty.edu.

Artist Raoul De La Sota will lead a bus tour of Los Angeles murals, including works by East Los Streetscapers, Judy Baca, Kent Twitchell,  and many more. Tour begins with  a viewing of the mural América Tropical by David Alfaro Siqueiros at the América Tropical Interpretive  Center. Wear comfortable shoes as there will  be some walking as we disembark and re-board at key murals along the way.

Organized by the Getty Conservation Institute

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Saturday, November 3, 2012 – 12 pm to 7 pm

¡América Tropical! A Festival Celebrating Siqueiros

La Plaza de Cultura y Artes and El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument

501 N. Main Street, Los Angeles *

Free admission. For more information, visit www.getty.edu

Eighty years after it was first painted, the mural América Tropical by David Alfaro Siqueiros − one  of  the  great  Mexican  artists  of  the  20th   century  −  is  again on  view  to  the  public. Bring your family to this festival celebration and explore the artistic, social, and historical significance of América Tropical through food, music, dance, children’s activities and more.

Organized by the Getty Conservation Institute, La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, and El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument

By Elaine Woo elaine.woo@latimes.com, Los Angeles Times, September 19, 2011, 9:22 a.m.

Shifra Goldman was a scholar of modern Latin American art, taking it seriously long before most in American academia did. This 1995 photograph shows her with her newly published book on the subject, "Dimensions of the Americas." (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times / September 20, 2011)

In the early 1970s, when Shifra Goldman proposed a doctoral dissertation on modern Mexican art, her professors at UCLA sneered. Compared to European art, the art of Latin America was, in their view, imitative, too political, unworthy of serious scholarly attention.

But Goldman, a scrappy civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activist who went back to school in her mid-30s, refused to consider a more mainstream topic. Describing herself years later as a person who was “born on the margins, lived on the margins and … always sympathized with the margins,” she bided her time for several years until a more open-minded professor arrived who was willing to supervise her research.

She not only published her dissertation as a book, “Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change” (1981), but went on to become a seminal figure in the rise of Latin American and Chicano art history as legitimate fields of study.

Goldman died Sept. 11 in Los Angeles from Alzheimer’s disease, said her son, Eric Garcia. She was 85.

Calling herself an activist art historian, Goldman was an early champion of Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros and persisted for decades to preserve his last public work in the United States: the “América Tropical” mural at Olvera Street. The Getty Conservation Institute is collaborating with the city of Los Angeles to rescue the rare mural.

“There was no one like Shifra,” said artist and Cal State Northridge professor Yreina D. Cervantez. “She was an advocate and a scholar on Chicano and Chicana art long before it was recognized and … she put it in the context of the larger art world. Her commitment was unmovable and constant.”

Goldman “was an intellectual pioneer with strong social convictions,” said Chon Noriega, director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center where Goldman was a research associate in the mid-1990s. Noriega described one of her books — “Arte Chicano,” a comprehensive 1985 bibliography co-written with Tomás Ybarra-Frausto — as “the bible for Chicano art history.”

“We really have to rewrite the history of modern art,” Goldman told The Times in 1992. “That’s the tall order that many of us have set for ourselves. You have to insert the modern art of Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

Born Shifra Meyerowitz on July 18, 1926, she grew up in New York steeped in the leftist politics of her parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland. She attended the city’s High School of Music and Art before moving to Los Angeles in the 1940s.

A studio art major at UCLA, she joined a student boycott of Westwood barbers who refused haircuts to African American veterans of World War II attending UCLA on the GI Bill. She left UCLA before earning her degree and immersed herself in the nascent Mexican American civil rights movement led by activist Bert Corona. She learned Spanish living in East Los Angeles and in 1952 married John Garcia.

The marriage ended after a few years, and a second marriage also ended in divorce. She is survived by her son and a grandson.

“She said she was a women’s libber before it existed,” her son, Eric, said last week. “She had a hard time with men. They didn’t want this intellectual powerhouse. She was a very intense woman.”

During the 1950s Goldman worked in a factory assembling refrigerators and stoves; later she was a bookkeeper. She remained active in radical causes, which in 1959 led to a subpoena to appear before a panel of the House Un-American Activities Committee. She refused to answer questions.

Unsatisfied with her life, she returned to UCLA, completing her bachelor’s degree in art in 1963. She earned a master’s from Cal State L.A in 1966 and a doctorate from UCLA in 1977, both in art history.

She taught at a number of colleges in Southern California, including Santa Ana College, until 1992, when she retired from full-time teaching.

In 2008 she donated her meticulously organized collections of correspondence, articles, books, museum catalogs, gallery announcements and art slides — many showing works that have disappeared — to the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives at UC Santa Barbara.

“Anybody who was seriously involved in Latino/Chicano art has visited Shifra at home and gone through her collection. She was the archivist of the field,” Noriega said.

Her archive includes material about Siqueiros’ “América Tropical,” which was badly deteriorated after decades of neglect when Goldman discovered it in 1968. Olvera Street merchants had painted over the mural soon after its completion in 1932 because of its controversial depiction of a Mexican Indian crucified on a double cross under an American eagle. An Aztec and a Mexican revolutionary are pointing rifles at the eagle.

“It was Shifra who really spearheaded the very first effort to preserve the Siqueiros mural,” said filmmaker Jesus Treviño, who worked with her to make a 1971 KCET documentary about it. “There were artists who said to her, ‘Let me repaint it,’ but she said, ‘If the Mona Lisa fades you don’t have someone come in to repaint it for Da Vinci.’ She was adamant that this was by a great artist and the original work should be preserved.”

The Getty and the city expect to unveil the mural and a new interpretive center next year.

“It is the last Siqueiros mural to remain in its original site in the U.S.,” said Leslie Rainer, the Getty mural specialist who is overseeing the conservation project. “Shifra understood its importance.”

A memorial will be held at 2 p.m. on Oct. 15 at the Professional Musicians Local 47, 817 Vine St., Hollywood, CA 90038.

Nearly 80 years after Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros left Los Angeles, he is once again creating a buzz in the city.

In 1932, a mural Siqueiros was commissioned to paint turned out to be a controversial piece of art that was quickly censored. For decades, Chicano artists and activists have worked to bring the mural back to life — and that mission will soon be accomplished.

Siqueiros On Olvera Street

Early last century, Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and Jose Orozco were the three major politically active Mexican muralists who merged revolutionary ideas with public street art.

But Siqueiros’ prominence in Mexico didn’t do much to keep him out of trouble. In 1932, the artist was jailed for his radical militancy. After his release, he secured a six-month visa to L.A.

“Siqueiros — being the idealist that he is and having fought in the Mexican Revolution — well, in Los Angeles, he fuses art and politics,” says Luis Garza, curator of the current exhibition of Siqueiros’ work at L.A.’s Autry Museum of the American West. The show features depictions of three murals Siqueiros painted when he lived in L.A., including one he painted on historic Olvera Street.

Writer Ruben Martinez says Olvera Street was meant to be an idealized version of a Mexican marketplace: “quaint, folkloric, cutesy, touristy and assiduously avoiding anything controversial or political.”

He says his grandparents used to play guitar and sing at La Golondrina Cafe on Olvera Street.  While they were working downstairs, Siqueiros was upstairs on the roof, painting the mural.

“My grandparents were part of staging the quaint folkloric Mexico,” Martinez says of La Golondrina. “And Siqueiros was painting something that flew in the face of that. It was a great subversive act.”

In making the massive mural on the wall of the old Italian Hall next-door to La Golondrina, Siqueiros pioneered an experimental technique of spraypainting, inspiring many graffiti artists who followed.

Martinez says besides being a “quaint ethnic theme park,” Olvera Street also was a radical political venue for gatherings of labor organizers, and Italian and Mexican anarchists.

‘America Tropical’

In a 1971 documentary by Chicano filmmaker Jesus Trevino, Siqueiros explains that he’d been commissioned to paint a lush, romanticized, idyllic mural with the theme of “Tropical America.”

“But for me,” Siqueiros says in the documentary, ” ‘America Tropical’ was a land of natives, of Indians, Creoles, of African-American men, all of them invariably persecuted and harassed by their respective governments.”

At the time of the mural’s commission, Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans throughout the Southwest were being rounded up, packed into railroad cars and deported to Mexico. Police “Red Squads” were violently breaking up union meetings, and racially motivated trials were sending African-American men to prison for life on hearsay evidence.

Siqueiros’ mural was a response to all of that.

The central figure is an indigenous Indian peasant lashed to a double cross. Bearing down over him is the American eagle, which two Latin American warriors take aim at from the corner.

Siqueiros titled the mural America Tropical: Oprimida y Destrozada por los Imperialismos — or “Tropical America: Oppressed and Destroyed by Imperialism.”

“It was political commentary, pure and simple, on an 18-by-82-foot wall,” curator Luis Garza says. “He had the cojones to do it on that size of a wall, facing city hall. ‘The chutzpah of this man; how dare he!’ was the reaction by some.”

The mural scandalized Olvera Street officials, who ordered it whitewashed.

“Without a doubt,” Siqueiros says in the documentary, “my work was destroyed because of its theme.”

Bringing The Mural Back To Life

Ironically, years of being covered over by white paint actually saved the mural from complete deterioration by the sun and rain.

Since the 1970s, Chicano artists inspired by Siqueiros’ work have crusaded to preserve America Tropical. They finally got mainstream acceptance and help from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (L.A.’s first Mexican-American mayor in more than a century) and the prestigious Getty Conservation Institute.

In September, city officials broke ground on a restoration project for the mural, which will include a platform on Olvera Street for people to view and appreciate Siqueiros work.

America Tropical won’t re-emerge until 2012, but Siqueiros’ art is now on display at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach and through January at the Autry Museum’s exhibit Siqueiros in Los Angeles: Censorship Defied.

The mural itself is still pretty faint, but photographer Jose Luis Sedano of Amigos de Siqueiros, the organization that will soon serve as stewards for the upcoming Siqueiros Mural Center, says the plan is to digitally project the original image over the mural.

“There’s still enough that it makes sense to bring it back to the people,” Sedano says. “It’s still a powerful statement.”

THEN, as now, the economy was depressed and America was deporting Mexicans in droves. The year was 1932 and David Alfaro Siqueiros, a Mexican artist who now ranks with Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco as one of the three great Mexican muralists of the last century, arrived in Los Angeles. His visit was to prove unexpectedly short (seven months), but consequential. The tale is documented in an exhibition that has just opened at the Autry in Griffith Park in the city.

Like Rivera, who was ten years older and a mentor until the two fell out over politics, Siqueiros was a Communist. After Mexico’s revolution he founded a union and may also have plotted to kill the president. That had landed him in jail. He was now planning to go into exile in America.

Sponsored by some rich white art-lovers in Los Angeles, Siqueiros arrived in the city to teach at its art school. There he experimented with new industrial tools and made a breakthrough. Murals at this time were still painted indoors, with essentially the same fresco techniques that Michelangelo had used. But Siqueiros, using spray guns, blowtorches and projection systems, turned an entire cement façade into an outdoor mural.

This came to the attention of a wealthy widow, Christine Sterling. She had a romantic notion of Los Angeles’s Mexican past and was in the process of restoring the city’s historic centre, Olvera Street. She imagined a Latino park full of haciendas and adobes, guitars and castanets. So, for the appropriate visuals, she commissioned the Mexican artist who had just worked out a way to paint outdoor murals.

The mural’s title was to be “América Tropical”, its theme a jungle paradise of parrots and fruits and blissfully capering Mexicans and Americans. Siqueiros thought about it. “How were the tropics?” he asked himself, and concluded that they were “exploited by the allied bourgeoisie” led by imperialist America. He also noticed that his allotted wall faced the city’s tallest building at the time, City Hall. Time to send a message.

He did not finish the mural until 1am on the morning of its unveiling. When that happened, the city’s elite gaped in horror. There on the wall they beheld an indigenous Latin American crucified beneath a domineering American eagle, a Mayan temple crumbling in the background. Two revolutionary warriors armed with guns perched at the edge on a red platform, ready to begin the fight (the middle portion of this mural is shown above).

The high society of Los Angeles was outraged, and Mrs Sterling mortified. The mural, like the painter’s one at the art school, was swiftly whitewashed. When Siqueiros applied to renew his visa it was promptly denied. So he left, his murals seemingly destined to be forgotten.

But they were not. In the 1960s the civil-rights movement swept the United States, and the Latino equivalent of Martin Luther King was César Chávez, who founded a union for farm workers and mobilised America’s Chicanos (American-born Mexicans). The artists in his movement were looking for inspiration. They found it under the whitewashed walls.

Using both the techniques and the style of Siqueiros’s murals, Chicanos started painting the walls of Los Angeles, changing its look permanently. The mural culture then spread to other places in California and to the rest of the country. Philadelphia might today be described as its epicentre. And so, from beneath the whitewash, re-emerged the art that defied censorship, mocked the patronising American taste for Mexican curio knick-knacks, indicted American excesses south of the border and encouraged, then as now, the many Latinos who live in America’s shadows.

The exhibition, “Siqueiros in Los Angeles: Censorship Defied” relates this strange bit of history with over 100 paintings, murals, drawings, newspaper articles and film clips. Visitors start in a claustrophobic room that documents Mexican history during the revolution. They then move into progressively larger and more open streetscapes leading at last to the modern city, bustling with its mural art.

The curator, Luis Garza, met Siqueiros once, in 1971. Mr Garza was a young radical Chicano; Siqueiros was ageing but still a Communist. The two men exchanged vodka shots through the night, talking art and politics. Mr Garza believes that he was forever changed by this brief contact.

Golden shovels used at the Sept. 8, 2010 groundbreaking ceremony for the Siqueiros Mural and Interpretive Center on L.A.’s historic Olvera Street. Photo by Mark Vallen ©.

Originally published at Mark Vallen’s Art for a Change blog on Sept. 11 2010.

The construction of the Siqueiros América Tropical Mural And Interpretive Center on Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles grows ever closer. Carol Jacques, Commission Vice President of the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument Authority, invited me to attend the historic groundbreaking ceremony for the Interpretive Center that took place on September 8, 2010, and as someone who has been writing in-depth coverage on this story for years, it was an opportunity I could not pass by.

At 10 a.m. I arrived at the Avila Adobe House on Olvera Street for the scheduled press conference, and found the bungalow filled to capacity with L.A. City government officials, Getty museum functionaries, foreign dignitaries, art aficionados, news media, and many of those who have worked so diligently over the decades to “bring Siqueiros back” to Los Angeles.

Featured speakers who addressed the press conference included the Director of the Getty Conservation Institute, Timothy P. Whalen, and Los Angeles Councilmember José Luis Huizar. Both gave short speeches on the history of the mural, the status of the Interpretive Center project, and their belief that the center will enrich the cultural and intellectual life of Los Angeles.

The setting for the press conference was the aforementioned Avila Adobe House, the oldest house in the city of Los Angeles. It was originally constructed in 1818 by Don Francisco Avila, who was the Mayor of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles (The Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels). The stucco-clad adobe dwelling was erected before the United States invaded Mexico, forcing it to cede California, Nevada, Utah, Texas, and parts of Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Wyoming to the U.S. in 1848. The adobe also stood before Mexico won its Independence from Spain in 1821.

I was overwhelmed thinking that the house made from sun-dried bricks of clay and straw, a building that had seen so much history, was now the setting for a press conference announcing the construction of a 21st century interactive arts center. After completion of the news conference, the assembly was invited to move to the adjacent Italian Hall, where the rooftop Siqueiros mural is located and where the actual groundbreaking was to occur.

An air of expectation grew as the crowd gathered on the steps of the old Italian Hall, waiting for the historic groundbreaking ceremony to begin as photographers jockeyed for position. In due time representatives of the Getty Center, along with members of L.A.’s City government, took their golden shovels in hand to enact the symbolic breaking of the ground.

With that emblematic gesture, cheers of approval and applause rose up from the crowd, and construction of the Siqueiros América Tropical Mural And Interpretive Center was at last underway.

After the groundbreaking ceremony the media and the public were invited to the rooftop of the Italian Hall to view the current state of the mural project. Due to the precarious condition of the old building, city workers would only allow 25 people at a time to visit the roof, but the wait was worthwhile.

Susan Macdonald, Head of Field Projects for the Getty Conservation Institute, and Leslie Rainer, Senior Project Specialist for the Getty Conservation Institute, greeted those who climbed the stairs to the rooftop. The two lectured on various aspects of the project, and with great enthusiasm answered all questions pertaining to the mural venture. Presently the mural is protected from top to bottom by a metal screen and supporting armature. City officials and Getty staff both made assurances that the project would be completed and ready for public unveiling by the end of two years time.

When Siqueiros came to L.A. in 1932 as a political refugee, the U.S. was in the throws of the Great Depression. Millions of people were out of work and had lost their homes. The government was involved in the mass expulsion of up to one million people of Mexican descent, including tens of thousands of U.S. citizens; Los Angeles County alone deported up to 80,000 people to Mexico, many of them apprehended on or around Olvera Street and its environs. In 1936 the Spanish Civil War was the opening salvo of what would become WWII. Such matters were surely on the mind of the artist when he painted his mural works during his six-month long exile in L.A.

As Siqueiros’ América Tropical mural is being reborn on Olvera Street in the early 21st century, the U.S. is in the grip of unemployment rates the likes of which have not been seen since the Great Depression. Millions of people have lost their homes, city budgets are collapsing and social services are being cut to the bone. Hatred of immigrants is rampant and escalating, and the nation is fighting multiple foreign wars; which is to say, the present political landscape bears an eerie resemblance to the 1930s. The question is not how David Alfaro Siqueiros would react if he were alive, the question is – how will today’s artists respond to the mounting social crisis.

Los Angeles — Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa and Councilmember JoséHuizar today joined Deborah Marrow, Interim President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, Timothy Whalen, Director of the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), and Joan Weinstein, Interim Director of the Getty Foundation, to announce a public-private collaboration to finalize conservation efforts on and provide public access to América Tropical, an internationally renowned “lost” mural located in the historic El Pueblo district of the City of Los Angeles.

The $7.8 million public-private investment ($3.95 million commitment from the Getty Foundation and $3.852 million in matching funds from the City of Los Angeles) will go towards the completion of the conservation of the mural, the construction of a protective shelter and viewing platform, a visitor bridge, the installation of an interpretive center to place the mural in its historical and artistic context, and annual monitoring of the condition of the mural by staff of the Getty Conservation Institute.

“The people of the City of Los Angeles will finally be able to view this cultural treasure long obscured from sight,” says Mayor Villaraigosa. “The mural was controversial in its time and its history will allow adults and children of all ages to learn about and appreciate the diverse history of this City, the importance of freedom of artistic expression, and the origins of the outdoor mural movement in this City. I’m proud that the City of Los Angeles and the Getty have come together to make this important investment in public art.”

“We are pleased to partner with the City of Los Angeles to preserve this monumental work of 20th-cent

In 1988, the Getty Conservation Institute began the conservation of the mural. By 2006, the Getty and the City of Los Angeles committed a combined $8.9 million to build the America Tropical Interpretive Center (ATIC).

ATIC will include a protective shelter, a viewing platform and the creation of an interpretive center in the restored Sepulveda House.

In 2008, Amigos de Siqueiros was established to contribute to the enhancement of the multi-media content and technology in the Sepulveda House. Amigos will become stewards of the America Tropical Interpretive Center to ensure a vibrant, historic, premiere public destination for future generations.

Letters to Siqueiros

Thursday, October 4th – 7:00pm

El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument Pico House

424 N. Main Street

Award-winning filmmaker and author Jesus Treviño will screen América Tropical, his 1971 documentary about David Alfaro Siqueiros. He will be joined by three Chicano muralists (Wayne Healy, Barbara Carasco and John Valadez), each reading a letter to Siqueiros describing his impact on them personally and in their work, a letter none had the opportunity to send to Siqueiros during his lifetime.

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Siqueiros in Los Angeles

Friday, October 5th – 7:00pm

El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument Pico House

424 N. Main Street

Celebrated author, historian, and Siqueiros expert Dr. Irene Herner Reiss will present a lecture about the time Siqueiros spent in Los Angeles and the roll of the mural as a cultural artifact in a city where the past is often forgotten.  Dr. Herner will be joined by author Ruben Martinez and artist Andrés Montoya.

"Siqueiros in Calle Olvera" – Peter Wood. 2008. © All rights reserved. Oil on canvas. 7 x 5 ft.

Originally published in Mark Vallen’s Art for a Change blog on June 12, 2010.

Since January 2005, this web log has been following the history of América Tropical – the famous 1932 mural painted by Mexican Muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros on Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles. So it is my pleasure to announce the first of three important L.A. panel discussions regarding the mural and the legacy of Siqueiros.

Organized by Amigos de Siqueiros and moderated by painter Raoul De la Sota, América Tropical At Last is an artist organized forum that will present “an overview of the career of David Alfaro Siqueiros and a discussion of the social and political events during which he worked.”

Panelists will include the creative director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center, Judy Baca; photographer, writer, and curator of the upcoming Siqueiros: Censorship Defied exhibit at L.A.’s Autry museum, Luis Garza; historian and artist, Raul Herrera; historian Isabel-Rojas-Williams – and artist John Valadez.

The Friday, June 18, 2010, free public event begins at 7 p.m. The round-table discussion takes place at the Mexican Cultural Institute Art Gallery, which is located on the famous avenue where Siqueiros painted his controversial mural. The address for the Mexican Cultural Institute is 125 Paseo de la Plaza – the institute is adjacent to the famous bandshell at La Placita, right next to the historic Plaza Methodist Church. The gallery can be found in the institute’s basement from a street accessible staircase – look for the signage.

The June 18 opening of the Siqueiros panel discussion series at the Mexican Cultural Institute Gallery in Los Angeles, CA.

Update: The June 18, América Tropical At Last event at the beautiful Mexican Cultural Institute Gallery was well attended by around 100 people.

The forum lasted nearly three hours, which hardly seemed enough time for all of the presentations and audience feedback. Although the event was marred by technical problems and what I feel was a lack of focus, significant questions were still raised, and people were given much food for thought. I will offer a summation of the evening’s proceedings when I file a final report on the entire series of panel discussions – which I urge all Southern Californians to attend. Those outside the region will benefit from that final report, which is sure to reveal new information about Siqueiros, América Tropical, and the possibilities for a new social activism in art.

The next speaker’s forum, Artist Warrior: From Siqueiros to Carrasco and Beyond, is scheduled to take place on July 16, 2010, at the Mexican Cultural Institute Gallery, 7 p.m. According to the organizers, the evening will focus on the artist as a “political and cultural activist,” and “what strength of purpose” it takes to create public art “in these fractious times.” Panelists will include artist Jose Antonio Aguirre, artist Raul Baltazar, artist and teacher Glenna Avila, artist Barbara Carrasco, artist Wayne Healy, and a screening of Bert Corona’s film Artist Warrior. Corona (1918-2001), is considered by many to have been one of the founder’s of the Chicano movement.

The final panel, Freedom of Speech and Censorship, will take place on August 20, 2010, at the L.A. headquarters building of the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund (MALDEF). The program starts at 7 p.m. and will feature artist Ernesto de la Loza, artist Gilbert Magu Lujan, artist Eloy Torrez, the President of MALDEF, Thomas Saenz, and a screening of Jesus Trevino’s film, América Tropical. MALDEF is located at 634 S. Spring Street, Los Angeles, CA. 90014. The final two panel discussions will also be moderated by artist and teacher, Raoul De la Sota.

[ The painting of Siqueiros was kindly provided by artist Peter Wood, whose works can be seen here. You may contact Mr. Wood at oaxacamouth@hotmail.com ].