David Alfaro Siqueiros’s Indictment of the New York Market for Mexican Art and Antiquities
Race, Alienation, and Ethnography
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21643239 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jennifer Jolly (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 1-2 |
| Pages | 150-179 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Art (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1073-9300 • E-ISSN: 1549-6503 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/740793 |
| OpenAlex | W7165659076 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 24 |
When David Alfaro Siqueiros exhibited Ethnography in New York in 1940, a reviewer recognized its heroic Mexican campesino imagery but also described it as “scary.” Towering above a stormy horizon, the campesino’s face is obscured by an Olmec mask, recently looted and smuggled to New York. Examining Ethnography within three traditions of racial thought—modernist primitivism with its temporal artistic discourses, official indigenismo’s culturalist understanding of race, and Marxist critiques of international class relations—elucidates its challenge to New Yorkers’ typical views of Mexicans and exposes the dehumanizing nature of racial thinking under capitalism. For sale at Pierre Matisse’s gallery, it drew attention to its own uncomfortable position in the art and antiquities market. Read as a response to Matisse’s 1939 art and antiquities-hunting trip to Mexico, Ethnography reveals the alienation at the heart of cultural and primitivist racial discourses within the art market
Art market · Empire · Indictment · Performance art · Art History and Market Analysis · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Photographic and Visual Arts
Inventing Indigenism
Vision, Race, and Modernity
Race and Ethnicity in Latin America
Silent Racism and Intellectual Superiority in Peru
The Mestizo State
Imagining Identity in New Spain
Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico
Local People's Global Politics
A Black Construction of Colonialism
José María Morelos, Brownness, and the Visibility of Race in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
Oil, Art, And Politics. The Feminization of Mexico
Animating Internationalism
The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II
Measuring Skulls
Manuel Gamio and Official Indigenismo in Mexico
Indigenismo and the Limits of Cultural Appropriation
Postrevolutionary Intellectuals, Rural Readings and the Shaping of the 'Peasant Problem' in Mexico
The Mexican Communist Party and Agrarian Mobilization in the Laguna, 1920-1940
Marx's intertwining of race and class during the Civil War in the United States
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |