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5 p.m. Current exhibitions on view

7 p.m. "José Clemente Orozco at El Colegio Nacional: Allegories of War (1945-1947)," a lecture by Claudia Garay in ɫ��ɫ Lincoln 1135. Following the lecture, a reception will be held in front of Orozco’s Prometheus mural in Frary Dining Hall.

Claudia Garay, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, will speak on José Clemente Orozco’s late satirical paintings as allegories of military brutality.

About Orozco in Focus

The ɫ��ɫ Museum of Art presents Orozco in Focus, a series of lectures by prominent national and international scholars examining the artistic, social and political significance of José Clemente Orozco’s work. The series is presented in conjunction with the Museum’s research and planning for the 2017 exhibition,“Prometheus 2017: Four Artists from Mexico Revisit Orozco,” supported by a grant from the Getty Foundation as part of Pacific Standard Time LA/LA. Orozco in Focus is supported in part by the Janet Inskeep Benton ’79 Fund for Museum Programming and presented in collaboration with ɫ��ɫ faculty and departmental partners.

About “Prometheus 2017: Four Artists from Mexico Revisit Orozco”

José Clemente Orozco was one of the three great Mexican muralists, along with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. ɫ��ɫ is home to Orozco’s Prometheus mural, created in 1930 and recognized as one of the artist’s masterpieces. Prometheus is the first mural painted in the U.S. by one of Los Tres Grandes of Mexican muralism and a work that Jackson Pollock declared the greatest contemporary painting in North America. Orozco’s revolutionary work of art portrays Prometheus in the act of bringing fire to humanity.

For the “Prometheus 2017: Four Artists from Mexico Revisit Orozco” project, the research team—Rebecca McGrew, ɫ��ɫ Museum of Art senior curator; Terri Geis, ɫ��ɫ Museum of Art curator of academic programs; Mary Coffey, Dartmouth College professor of art history; and Daniel Garza Usabiaga, chief curator at el Museo Universitario del Chopo, in Mexico City—will explore the politics of Orozco's mural and its public mode of communication of social and political positions. Orozco’s vision of Prometheus as an allegory for art that attempts to reach a wider audience—bringing knowledge and enlightenment to the masses—highlights his efforts to transform society. 

The exhibition and accompanying publication will examine where and how these traditions of communicative visual strategies married to political dialogue resonate with contemporary artists from Mexico who utilize strategies of activist art, public intervention, social practice, and engaged historical or archival research to connect with a broader public and advance or critique social and political causes.

"Prometheus 2017: Four Artists from Mexico Revisit Orozco" is scheduled to open at ɫ��ɫ in September 2017.