5 pm Current exhibitions on view
7 pm “Revising Orozco," a lecture by Alejandro Anreus, Associate Professor of Art History and Latin American Studies, William Patterson University in Frary Dining Hall, Private Dining Room followed by a reception in front of Orozco's Prometheus mural. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Pomona College Museum of Art and the Pomona College Romance Languages and Literatures Department.
9 p.m. Live music co-sponsored by KSPC and Chicano Latino Student Affairs (CLSA) featuring Maya Jupiter
About Orozco in Focus
The Pomona College Museum of Art introduces Orozco in Focus, a new series of lectures by prominent national and international scholars examining the artistic, social and political significance of José Clemente Orozco’s work.
The Orozco in Focus series will be inaugurated with “Revising Orozco,” a lecture by Alejandro Anreus, associate professor at William Patterson University. Anreus will examine key issues within Orozco’s artistic production, including his stylistic shifts, misunderstood politics, view of history and “social expressionism.” Anreus is an authority on the art of Latin America and the author of Orozco in Gringoland (2001) and co-editor of Mexican Muralism: A Critical History (2012).
On Feb. 6, 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 and has published widely on Orozco.
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.
