Talk: Anna Indych-López, "Beyond the Controversy: Diego Rivera's Rockefeller Center Mural and the Politics of Space"

The destruction of Rivera's mural for the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center in New York is one of the best-known examples of censorship in the United States.  Although scholars have focused on Rivera's painted image of Lenin, this talk examines the controversy over his mural within the context of artistic/architectural collaboration and the diverging views of public art in the 1930s.  Specifically, it analyzes the ways in which Rivera and the muralist movement in the United States exposed that mural art was a battle over the public sphere.  It discusses the controversy and the mural in order to see what we can learn about Rivera's politicized approach to architecture, space, and design.

Anna Indych-López is associate professor of art history at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She specializes in the modern art of Latin America, specifically Mexico. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in 2003. A frequent contributor to exhibition catalogues on Modern Mexican and Latin American art, she has also published on contemporary Latino/a artists. She received the College Art Association's Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant for her book Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927-1940 published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2009 and is co-author of Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art published by MoMA in 2011. She is currently writing a book on muralist Judy Baca for the CSRC A Ver series.

This event is FREE.

Watch the video of this event here.

Image: Diego Rivera's Man at the Crossroads mural for the RCA Building, Rockefeller Center, censored in 1933.