The Female Voice in the Mexican Story: The Murals of Fanny Rabel, Regina Raull, and Valetta Swann at the Museo Nacional de Antropología, 1963-1964. (original) (raw)

2020, The Female Voice in the Mexican Story: The Murals of Fanny Rabel, Regina Raull, and Valetta Swan at the Museo Nacional de Antropología, 1963-1964.

The construction of the Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Anthropology Museum) in 1964 symbolized the results of the nation's economic growth and served as the long-awaited answer to Mexico's desire to properly conserve and display its pre-Columbian past, in order to prove its growing national power and pride to a bourgeoning global audience. During its construction, the institution hired the largest group of women muralists for a federal project. While the commission of this project was meant to be strictly apolitical and purely narrative, the women muralists of the MNA were still successful in creating and promoting radical political and gender-related content. Continuing the legacy of the Mexican Mural Renaissance, these groups of murals highlight the historical, spiritual, and cultural importance of women in Mexican history, a story that was continually developing in the 1960s. This thesis focuses on three of these artists who most explicitly inserted the female narrative into their works, challenging the male-dominated areas of art, culture, and shaping of the national story. These examples include Fanny Rabel's La ronda en el tiempo (The round of time) (1964), Regina Raull's La educación del niño en la época mexica (The Education of the child in the pre-Hispanic era) (1966), and Valetta Swann's Las delicias (The Delights) (1964). The murals of the MNA do more than just create a state-mandated message; they push the boundaries of art as a tool for social consciousness and a testimony to the importance of women's art in Mexican art history.

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