Full Description
Essays on the rise of community-focused art projects and anti-monuments in Mexico since the 1980s.
Mexico has long been lauded and studied for its post-revolutionary public art, but recent artistic practices have raised questions about how public art is created and for whom it is intended. In The New Public Art, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, together with a number of scholars, artists, and activists, looks at the rise of community-focused art projects, from collective cinema to off-stage dance and theatre, and the creation of anti-monuments that have redefined what public art is and how people have engaged with it across the country since the 1980s.
The New Public Art investigates the reemergence of collective practices in response to privatization, individualism, and alienating violence. Focusing on the intersection of art, politics, and notions of public participation and belonging, contributors argue that a new, non-state-led understanding of "the public" came into being in Mexico between the mid-1980s and the late 2010s. During this period, community-based public art bore witness to the human costs of abuses of state and economic power while proposing alternative forms of artistic creation, activism, and cultural organization.
Contents
Introduction. Agoraphilia: Notes on the Possibility of the Public (Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra)
New Muralisms
Chapter 1. New Muralisms after Muralism (Natalia de la Rosa and Julio GarcÍa Murillo)
Dossier A. Grupo Germen
Chapter 2. Public, Political, and Aesthetic Spaces in Ayotzinapa (Ana Torres)
Dossier B. Campamento Audiovisual Itinerante (CAI)
Feminist Publics
Chapter 3. Politics of Enunciation and Affect in an Age of Corporeal Violence: MÓnica Mayer's The Clothesline and Pinto mi Raya's Embraces (Karen Cordero Reiman)
Dossier C. Colectivo A.M.
Chapter 4. Performative Resurrections: Necropublics and the Work of Guadalupe GarcÍa-VÁsquez (Erin L. McCutcheon)
Dossier D: Teatro Ojo
Chapter 5. The Ultimate Witnesses: Listening to Teresa Margolles's Counterforensic Archive (Carlos Fonseca and Enea Zaramella)
Dossier E: La Casa de El Hijo del Ahuizote
Antimonuments and the Undercommons
Chapter 6. Public Art and the Grammars of Antiracism (AbeyamÍ Ortega DomÍnguez and Sarah Abel)
Dossier F: Aeromoto
Chapter 7. Menos DÍas AquÍ and Bordamos por la Paz: Grief, Social Protest, and Grassroots Memorialization in Mexico's War on Drugs (Adriana Ortega Orozco)
Dossier G: Antimonuments: The Brigade for Memory
Chapter 8. Conceptualizing the Public: Femicide, Memorialization, and Human Rights Law (Michael R. Orwicz and Robin AdÈle Greeley)
Migrant Poetics and Capitalist Landscapes
Chapter 9. On Affordable Housing: Reflections on the (A)political Evolution of the Territory (Arturo Ortiz-Struck)
Dossier H: Brigada Tlayacapan
Chapter 10. Polvo/Polvoriento/Polvareda: The Poetics of Dust, Dissent, and Migration (Erica Segre)
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index
