LECTURE: “Orozco, History, and Myth,” by Mary Coffey as part of the Orozco in Focus series

Friday, February 6, 2015, 4:15 p.m.

4:15 p.m. “Orozco, History, and Myth,” a lecture by Mary Coffey, Associate Professor of Art History, Dartmouth College, in Lebus 113 followed by a reception at the Museum and a viewing of Orozco’s preparatory sketches for Prometheus. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Pomona College Museum of Art and the Pomona College Department of Art History.

About Orozco in Focus

The Pomona College 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.

Dartmouth College professor Mary Coffey will give the second “Orozco in Focus” lecture, exploring Orozco’s relationship to history, myth, and the public. Coffey is a specialist in the history of modern Mexican visual culture, with an emphasis on Mexican muralism and the politics of exhibition. Coffey’s book, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State received the Charles Rufus Morey Prize from the College Art Association for a distinguished book published in Art History in 2012.

The Orozco in Focus series is presented in conjunction with the Museum’s research and planning for the 2017 exhibition, “Prometheus 1930/2017,” 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 Pomona College faculty and departmental partners.

About “Prometheus 1930/2017”

José Clemente Orozco was one of the three great Mexican muralists, along with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Pomona College 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 1930/2017” project, the research team—Rebecca McGrew, Pomona College Museum of Art senior curator; Terri Geis, Pomona College 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 1930/2017” is scheduled to open at Pomona College in September 2017 and will travel to el Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City in 2018.