One of the most iconic images of the demonstrations and social struggles in half the world has been signed by the Mexican artist Adolfo Mexiac (Cuto de la Esperanza, Michoacán, 1927 – Cuernavaca, 2019). It is the famous linograph that shows a young man with indigenous features and an expression of rebellion whose mouth is silenced with a thick chain closed by a padlock. The work, precisely titled Freedom of expressionis from 1954 and the artist conceived it as a response to denounce the United States intervention in Guatemala, which ended with a coup d’état in 1954 against the legitimately elected president Jacobo Arbenz, all to satisfy the interests of the powerful United Fruit Company.
The padlock that closes the rebel boy’s mouth is inscribed with the words ‘Made in USA’ for the memory of infamy, so that there is no doubt about the role of Washington, and especially its intelligence agency, the CIA, in that episode. which continues to be an open wound in Central America. Mixiac understands very well what this North American intervention implies for Guatemala. “He is a rebellious, subversive, very consistent artist,” explains David Caliz, curator of a retrospective on the Michoacan author that is being exhibited at the National Museum of Art (MUNAL) in Mexico City until next February. “He is not a pamphleteer artist,” says Caliz. “His political proposal comes from libertarianism and what freedom implies for him.”
The work of the boy who suffers repression is part of 126 pieces by Adolfo Mexiac that his wife, Patricia Salas Velasco, has donated to the collections of the MUNAL and the National Print Museum, both in the Mexican capital. It is a beautiful collection of which 40 works are exhibited at the MUNAL, which has titled the exhibition Legacy of freedom. The exhibition is made up of three parts and begins with a self-portrait of the author, which shows him with a naked torso and a serious expression, a stubborn look, that seems to rebuke the visitor. Caliz explains that Mexiac painted the painting at the age of 82 and when he was going through a depressive period due to the physical vulnerability caused by old age. “Then he said ‘enough’ and started painting it. It was a catharsis in psychological terms, the decision to say no more to his situation. The painting has a landscape that shows that stormy moment in his life,” explains Caliz.
The exhibition is curated in such a way that the visitor can understand the different artistic facets of the author. It includes his works about the Mexican countryside and the life of peasants, those that represent nature, a section dedicated to the city, because Mixiac created several pieces after the devastating earthquake that destroyed much of Mexico City in 1985. Those pieces were sold to raise funds for the victims of that tragedy. The exhibition closes with images of the author created around a darker, introspective production, also related to death, because one of his children died and it was a hard blow for the artist. That piece, from 1982, was titled my fallen angel and it has a description that demonstrates the author’s pain for that loss: “My fallen angel: I would like to be the sea to hug you.”
Mixiac is a great reference for contemporary art in Mexico. He was part of the Taller de Gráfica Popular during the prolific decade of the 1950s, alongside other great creators such as Leopoldo Méndez and Pablo O’Higgins. He also studied at the School of Book Arts, where he learned the techniques of linoleum engraving and etching and entered the National Indigenous Institute in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, in southern Mexico, where he interacted with other artists such as the painter Alberto Beltrán, the writer Rosario Castellanos and the anthropologist and researcher and indigenist Ricardo Pozas. “From their artistic and literary trenches, they helped combat and denounce the social inequality of our native peoples,” MUNAL explained. “Yes, he is a very consistent artist, who has a large number of graphics referring to social movements, migration, and conflicts related to the fight for democracy,” adds curator Caliz.
Despite this oppositional attitude, denunciation and support for social movements, Mixiac did not suffer repression or censorship. On the contrary, he was able to work without the strong hand of the State trying to silence him, an example of the double standard that the PRI governments managed, which on the one hand allowed a certain freedom of artistic expression while repressing movements such as the student movement, with the massacre of Tlatelolco of 1968 or the so-called falconazo 1971, the massacre of young people on Corpus Thursday, when the Government decided not to send the Army to repress, but rather the so-called ‘hawks’, a paramilitary group that devastated the protest. “We make a reinterpretation, a resignification, of an engraving that unfortunately is very current in political terms,” says Caliz about the work. Freedom of expression. “He understood that art can also serve as a form of social transformation and as criticism within the State itself. What characterized Mixiac in his time is that he was an extremely consistent artist, born in the countryside, marked by the social inequalities that living in the countryside entails. He is an artist who experiences firsthand the difficulties in terms of social backwardness and who constantly expresses it from different platforms in his pieces,” says Caliz.
Some of the engravings exhibited by the MUNAL show images denouncing the way in which the peasants and indigenous people of Mexico live, in many parts forgotten by the State. “His passage through the National Indigenous Institute had to do with a didactic circumstance. What he did was generate illustrations that form a critique and that put on the table the inequalities and social structures that motivate it, but there is also a very important introspection around how he envisions the peasant, an imaginary of the peasant with a vision from the concept of autonomy; He was very interested in making that position clear in political terms,” explains Caliz.
This vindication of the peasant, of the rights of indigenous peoples, of social movements, is part of the legacy captured in the work of a committed artist, a libertarian who stood against injustice. “Being part of this group of contemporary artists who use the work to be able to give it a twist in terms of how freedom of expression is currently seen and how it is reconfigured in the events that have permeated the 21st century, let us think, for example, of Ayotzinapa, the circumstances of the social movements, with which Mixiac’s work is involved,” Caliz reinforces.
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