Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Brion, Katherine

Area of Concentration

Art History with Museum Studies

Abstract

After the Mexican Revolution ended in 1920, President Álvaro Obregón (1920-1924) enacted a national reconstruction plan that aimed to establish a unified national identity through visual culture. The plan foregrounded efforts toward the cultural inclusion and integration of Mexico’s substantial yet marginalized indigenous population. Through a variety of government-sponsored events, initiatives, and educational programs related to the visual arts, Obregón sought to unify the nation by promoting indigenous culture as integral to Mexican identity. In this thesis, I examine the key ways in which Obregón’s administration was involved in popularizing indigenous aesthetics and integrating them into modern Mexican culture, while highlighting the influence of Mexico’s colonial history, the concept of mestizaje, and the European Primitivism movement in these efforts. My first chapter examines the official valorization of the popular arts in the context of the 1921 Exhibition of Popular Arts during Mexico’s Centennial Celebration. My second chapter examines the Best Maugard method of drawing, a methodology for teaching art implemented into the federal public school system. Throughout my thesis, I emphasize how cultural unification led to the self-primitivization of Mexican culture in a context in which power imbalances encouraged the appropriation of indigenous aesthetics, the homogenization of distinct indigenous cultures, and the endorsement of essentialist views of indigenous peoples to appeal to modernist trends.

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