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El Alma Mexicana / The Mexican Soul
Selections from the Permanent Collection
March 7–May 30, 2009
Noel and Kathryn Dickinson Wadsworth Gallery
Modern Mexican art reveals a rich cultural heritage, having assimilated broad influences from
its pre-Columbian forebears, European academic and avant-garde practices, domestic folk traditions and turbulent political history. This abundance of constituent resources has produced an art that is at once both refined and naïve, beautiful and macabre, lucid in the depiction of natural forms yet rife with symbolic and mythic undertones.
El Alma Mexicana—conveys in graphic form those remarkable contradictions that are the essence of Mexican art
and the soul of its people. Drawn from the museum’s expanding collection of modern and contemporary Mexican art, the exhibition presents many of that country’s most significant artists, such as Leopoldo Méndez, José Guadalupe Posada, Diego Rivera and Francisco Zuñiga, along with important European and American artists who were attracted to and found
inspiration in Mexico’s culture and art, including Leonora Carrington, Howard Cook and William
Spratling.
On view in the Noel and Kathryn Dickinson Wadsworth Gallery, El Alma Mexicana features paintings, prints, photographs and decorative arts; bilingual exhibition labels are provided.
