"Art museums are intensely political organizations—political with a small ‘p’. Art is political because it is an expression of lived human experience; identity, love, sex, religion, death, home, happiness, and trauma have always been subjects for artists. A concerned trustee at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where I am the director, recently asked me if we would ever be the focus of protest. I assured him that we would, and urged him to walk around the galleries if he wanted to find offense. We have it all on our walls: imperialism, colonialism, war, oppression, discrimination, slavery, misogyny, rape, and more."
Last year at the MFAH I saw an exhibit about art and artists of “the Revolution” in Mexico. Never once did the descriptions refer to it as a Communist revolution or the (propaganda) artists as Communists or Communist sympathizers. Some of the artists rejected Communism and militant socialism but the exhibition descriptions didn’t give the visitors a scorecard as they viewed the pieces. Perhaps the “catalog” that was sold covered it but it was a glaring omission in the presentation.
https://www.mfah.org/exhibitions/paint-the-revolution-mexican-modernism-1910-1950
Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910–1950
June 25, 2017 — October 1, 2017
Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910–1950 charts the development of modern art in Mexico and the social, political, and cultural forces that shaped it over the course of nearly half a century. Featuring some 175 works—including prints, photographs, books, newspapers, easel paintings, large-scale portable murals, and mural fragments—Paint the Revolution is unprecedented for its breadth and variety.
The most comprehensive exhibition of modern Mexican art displayed in the United States in more than seven decades, Paint the Revolution presents masterpieces by well-known figures such as Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo. Also on display are works by many of their important contemporaries, including Manuel and Lola Álvarez Bravo, Miguel Covarrubias, Alfredo Ramos Martínez, Carlos Mérida, Roberto Montenegro, and Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo). Three historical murals by los tres grandes (“the three great ones”)—Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros—are digitally re-created and projected in the galleries. The exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to see the emergence of Mexico as a center of modern art.
https://thesocialist.org.au/life-politics-frida-kahlo/
Frida joined the Mexican Communist Party when she was in her 20s but left when her husband Diego Rivera, also a famous artist, was expelled. After the expulsion, Frida and Diego went to the US, and it was here that they began associating with the Left Opposition headed by Leon Trotsky.
THIS was not addressed in the exhibit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Clemente_Orozco
“While Rivera was a bold, optimistic figure, touting the glory of the revolution, Orozco was less comfortable with the bloody toll the social movement was taking”
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-artists/orozco.htm
“However, while he is associated with socialist realism, unlike his two artist colleagues Orozco did not join the Communist Party, and adopted a more humanistic approach in his public art which reflected his worldwide humanitarian concerns as well as the universal themes of freedom and justice and the futility of war. This less political approach brings him closer to the Social Realism movement, as led by Ben Shahn, with whom Diego Rivera collaborated on at least one mural in America. “
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Alfaro_Siqueiros
He was a Marxist-Leninist in support of the Soviet Union and a member of the Mexican Communist Party who participated in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Leon Trotsky in May 1940.
The major art form produced in Mexico during the years following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, especially during 1920–1940, was mural painting, mostly in the technique of fresco. Three artists dominated this period: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, known collectively as the Big Three. Rufino Tamayo, younger and less ideologically aligned to those three, followed his own path of a more modernist style
When Miss Modotti was deported from Mexico in 1930 because of her Communist political activities, Mr. Alvarez Bravo bought some of her cameras (one of which had belonged to Mr. Weston) and inherited her job. He was later commissioned to take portraits of the muralist painters, hired by Eisenstein as a cameraman on his film “Que Viva Mexico!” and invited to show his photographs at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York with Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans.
https://www.americanheritage.com/content/covarrubias
Covarrubias had begun work on Mexico South , a book about pre-Hispanic Olmec art, when World War II broke out. His involvement in leftist causes, often with known Communists like Diego Rivera, caused friction in his marriage when Rosa feared the effect of such associations on their friendship with the Whitney and Rockefeller
I'm guessing she wouldn't have gotten the job if we didn't have President Trump.