Amalia Mesa-Bains Retrospective at Berkeley Art Museum (reprinted from TheDemocracyChain.org)

AMALIA MESA-BAINS
Archaeology of Memory, Berkeley Art Museum
Emblems of the Decade: Borders,  Rena Bransten Gallery

The Trumpian Confederacy may be censoring actual, factual history (AKA Biden-Marxist fake news), but the socially liberal art world has embraced the populist, multiracial history of the United States.

One of the pre-eminent artists involved in this paradigm shift is the Bay Area’s Amalia Mesa-Bains, who has championed Mexican identity and culture since the 1970s. and is the subject of a major retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum and a related show—an installation and a set of digital collages on canvas— at San Francisco’s Rena Bransten Gallery. These shows follow a suite of recent museum retrospectives by a quintet of distinguished artists of color: all with ties to the Bay Area: Ruth Asawa, Bernice Bing, Dewey Crumpler, Carlos Villa, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Mesa-Bains, an author, educator, and curator as well as an artist, works in a variety of forms, butt is best known for her multimedia installations. These theatrical assemblage environments  conjoin old glamor photographs, postcards, toys, figurines, vintage furniture, shells, ceramic fragments, candles, crystals, mirrors, pearls, broken glass, draperies, gold leaf, dried leaves, rocks, sand, dried flower petals, branches and soil. ‘Voice-over’ quotations are inscribed over the imagery in collages, and in her installations, on the wall, or handwritten in the scattered materials on the floor.

These bricolage shrines to the dead—which commemorate strong-willed culture heroines like the seventeenth -century scholar-nun Sor Inès de la Cruz and the actress Dolores Del Rio—draw on the Mexican tradition of the ofrenda, a home altar created during the Day of the Dead to welcome the visiting souls of deceased family members. Photos of the dead honoree are displayed on the wall surrounded by crucifixes and images of the saints and the Virgin Mary; below, the ancestors’ favorite foods and drinks, along with candles, mirrors and yellow marigolds (cempazuchitl, a flower the Aztecs associated with death) complete the offerings. The Berkeley retrospective features almost sixty works from Mesa-Bains’ long career, including ofrenda along with shrines, altars, codices, and digital-collage prints. The wealth of information may seem daunting, but the artist’s homages are poetic and associational rather than literal and historic. I was particularly taken with the ghostly imagery that seems buried within the antique mirrors; the effect is achieved by abrading the silvering behind the glass surface and fixing the image of the saint or scholar in question so as to appear floating within the vaporous aperture: historical memory confronts the viewer like an apparition.

Mesa-Bains’ profusely decorated shrine installations center on items of antique furniture reflecting the artist’s studies of history, religion, culture, identity, and myth, which merge and collide, illuminating the conditions of the present.

A woman’s vanity or dressing table is the central focus of the anti-Freudian Venus Envy, Chapter I: First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End. In this examination of the virginal role model traditionally inculcated in adolescent Latinas. Surmounted by boudoir cloud of white satin ruching, the white table supports a clutter of artificial pearls, frame photos of young women, perfume bottles and Madonnas, with a suggestive seashell on the floor, but intimations of mortality intrude: a gold and silver skull peep from the half-opened drawers, and revealed in the mirror is the fearsome Aztec goddess Coatlicue, one of whose aspects, Cihuacōātl, "snake woman,” is associated with deaths in childbirth.

Sexual purity is again the subject in The Virgin’s Garden, featuring a hand-painted, moss-bedecked armoire or wardrobe, its half-open door revealing clothing and books inside. Inspired by a fifteenth-century German Renaissance painting, a copy of which is displayed nearby, the piece examines the hortus conclusus, or closed garden, the traditional emblem of female chastity—and especially of the Immaculate Conception— dating from the Song of Solomon: Hortus conclusus soror mea, sponsa, hortus conclusus, fons signatus. A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up…. Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.

The liberating education of the female mind during eras of male repression is the subject of The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The seventeenth-century colonial-era Mexican nun and intellectual, who had educated herself in her own library, which came to include four thousand books, hosted a salon in her nunnery of  for other learned women; wrote poetry and prose in Latin and Nahuatl on religion, love, feminism and the misogyny and hypocrisy of the dominant male order in a  “philosophical satire” entitled Hombres Necios, Foolish Men; and was punished, predictably, for her transgressions by being forced to sell her beloved library and return to traditional duties, dying in 1695 at the age of forty-seven, of plague while tending to her Hieronymite Order sisters. (Octavio Paz postulates that entering a nunnery was the best option available for ambitious, independent women at that time.) Sor Inés’ imagined work table, adorned with books, lamps, musical scores, and manuscripts, is flanked by a small stand being an Aztec figurine, an oil painting of a bespectacled inquisitorial grandee; and a heavy leather-upholstered chair lighted by large candlesticks, all painted gold. Stands of hair lie on the seat of the chair, suggesting the punitive shearing of tresses, or even the pulling out of hair in despair. (A twin of this chair appears, in silver, in the artist’s show on the US-Mexico border at Rena Bransten.) In the mirror above the desk Sor Inés appear, among her books, beneath a radiating pattern of fracture lines in the glass. These cracks were due to an art mishandling error, but the artist, perhaps remembering Duchamp’s embrace of accident in the Large Glass, liked them for their suggestion of a radiant intelligence, albeit one silenced by social duress.

This short article provides only a small sample of Mesa-Bains’ work, which also includes codices and digital collages addressing, among other things, the friction at the US-Mexico border (also in the San Francisco gallery show) and the artist’s recovery from a serious car accident through traditional curandera treatments. Two large sculptures, however, require mention. Cihuateotl with Mirror in Private Landscapes and Public Territories depicts Mother Earth as a voluptuously curvy woman, perhaps a sister to those zaftig Neolithic Venuses, but here covered in moss inscribed with Aztec glyphs for fertility, reclining on a carpet of verdure, admiring herself in a large, ornate hand mirror. It’s an environmentalist/feminist take, of course, with perhaps a poke at property-as-theft rights, of traditional love goddesses inspecting themselves, with the pre-eminent version being Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus. A specific landscape, that of the Rio Grande,  is the impetus behind What the River Gave to Me, the title of which must surely allude to Frida Kahlo’s elegiac 1939 painting, What the Water Gave Me. Mesa-Bains’s large sculpture reconstructs the river demarcating the border between the United States and Mexico as a luminous channel cutting through mountainous terrain carrying irregularly blue glass globes or bubbles, each bearing the name of a person who completed the perilous crossing, an illegal or undocumented alien now, but perhaps someday one of the “job creators” that we so fervently revere.





"Review of Florian von Donnersmarck's "Never Look Away," a pseudo-biopic of Gerhard Richter (originally published inVisualArtSource.com)


Never Look Away (Work without Author)

A month ago, I listed a number of films about art and artists that I thought worthwhile. Naturally, I forgot or missed some. Recently I watched Maurice Pialat’s 1991 film, ”Van Gogh,” with Jacques Dutronc  in a mesmerizing performance as the artist: quiet and observant—internalized—and very different from Kirk Douglas’s energetic interpretation in Lust for Life (which Dutronc said in an later interview that he liked, as I do). It’s a naturalistic film, verging on cinema verité, unbound by Hollywood script mechanics, and a wonderful recreation of 1880s rural France that might almost have sprung from a Renoir or Lautrec painting. It even refuses to hit the usual hagiographic high notes of Vincent’s wounding or death, which take place offscreen, but is no less affecting for that reticence.

A few days ago, I finally saw Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s new film (only his third), Never Look Away, loosely based on the life of the painter Gerhard Richter, who has intriguingly disavowed the film, as was recounted in a New Yorker profile a few months ago. The story of a young artist’s development in Nazi Germany in the1940s, in Communist East Germany in the 1950s and then in free West Germany in the 1960s sounded, with its interweaving of biography, history and politics, almost too good to be true. It was, slightly, but I still recommend it. The three-hour-long film’s recreation of the past is faultless, and Caleb Deschanel’s photography is gorgeous; in those respects NLA is similar to Mike Leigh’s 2014 Mr. Turner, another mixed success for me, sumptuous, but suffering from a flawed script.

Von Donnersmarck’s first film, The Lives of Others, from 2007, was an astonishing début, comparable to Orson Welles’ 1941 Citizen Kane, and one of the best movies I have ever seen in its integration of art and politics. In it, a leftist playwright, played by Sebastian Koch, in Communist East Germany, is suspected of subversion by a dedicated Stasi agent, played by the late Ulrich Mühe, who spies upon him—and is gradually converted from rigid conformity to a humanist appreciation for beauty and ambiguity; sitting hour after hour, listening through headphones, he’s humanized. We almost feel humanized, watching him. When he helps save the playwright fro prison, he is discovered, and demoted. Ten years later, the playwright, having discovered the facts, dedicates a memoir to his benefactor, who is now sweeping streets; he sees it in a bookstore window. Fade out. That’s an ending worthy of the best Charles Chaplin: sentimental, moving, and profoundly human.

Unfortunately, Never Look Away, for all its plot contrivances (which I won’t spoil for you), and political melodrama and comedy, does not soar into filmic immortality in the same way. Kurt, the young protagonist is a born observer, but powerless and seemingly unaffected when his young ‘artistic’ aunt, given to spells of madness, is seized by the Nazis for sterilization and exterminaton. Members of his family die in the war, and after the war Kurt tells his father, a former teacher reduced after denazification to scrubbing floors, that everything is connected (echoing his aunt’s delusion) and that he need never worry; later, Kurt discovers that his father has hanged himself, a bit stolen from Philip Guston’s life, but not, to my knowledge, Richter’s. Kurt enters art school in East Berlin and soon becomes a star pupil, charged with an important Socialist Realist mural due to his professor’s efforts. Kurt betrays him when he flees to West Berlin shortly before the wall is completed, with his young wife, who has, shall we say, some issues with her gynecologist father (Sebastian Koch again), a former Nazi who has managed to stay undiscovered. We see the mural—and it’s not that great, for Socialist Realism: a bit too lumpish for officialdom, frankly—being whitewashed after the defection, and we’re supposed to feel—what? Genius is too good for this wicked world?

Given this richly tragic story, we might expect a fittingly triumphant ending, but alas, no. Kurt, faced by the artistic liberties of the west, embodied in the Joseph Beuys figure at Dusseldorf Academy, is reduced to creative paralysis, experimenting with meaningless avant-garde trickery (walking on and slashing canvases, which, according to his teacher, are “not you”) before finally sitting immobile at his easel for entire days. Salvation comes when he seizes upon old photos of himself with his doomed aunt in happier times and of his odious Aryan father-in-law (who might be reasonably expected to approve of Kurt’s blond Siegfried poster-boy looks); he grids the photographs and paints them in grisaille, then takes a dry flat brush and smears horizontal streaks across them, simulating the depredations of time and history. When a rich classmate exhibits the work, they are a sensation, and at the end, at the Wuppertal Kunsthalle, Kurt answers questions from the arty audience about his imagery—and lies: they’re nobody in particular, he says; it’s easier when I don’t know the people. As for doing more gray snapshots, no: I am interested in color charts now. It’s an oddly antiheroic, banal conclusion—no matter that it follows Richter’s career, but trivializes it— to what we might have expected; it’s as if there had been no discovery of Rosebud’s identity at the end of Citizen Kane. (There are, however, metaphoric choruses of bus horns, resoundingly linking the 1940s and the 1960s.)

Mine is a minority opinion, so see it for yourself. A lot of it is memorable, even astounding—particularly the recreation of the 1937 Degenerate Art show in Berlin, for which duplicates of lost paintings were made—and I look forward to the director’s next effort, even if, like Welles, or Shyamalan, he should turn out to be a one-hit wonder, which is not such a bad thing, in the big picture. As for including a Monkees-style montage of art-student hijinks, set to Francoise Hardy’s “Le Temps de L’Amour” (I had the album during my francophile phase), well, it was the Sixties, everywhere, and everything is connected.Never Look Away (Work without Author)

A month ago, I listed a number of films about art and artists that I thought worthwhile. Naturally, I forgot or missed some. Recently I watched Maurice Pialat’s 1991 film, ”Van Gogh,” with Jacques Dutronc  in a mesmerizing performance as the artist: quiet and observant—internalized—and very different from Kirk Douglas’s energetic interpretation in Lust for Life (which Dutronc said in an later interview that he liked, as I do). It’s a naturalistic film, verging on cinema verité, unbound by Hollywood script mechanics, and a wonderful recreation of 1880s rural France that might almost have sprung from a Renoir or Lautrec painting. It even refuses to hit the usual hagiographic high notes of Vincent’s wounding or death, which take place offscreen, but is no less affecting for that reticence.

A few days ago, I finally saw Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s new film (only his third), Never Look Away, loosely based on the life of the painter Gerhard Richter, who has intriguingly disavowed the film, as was recounted in a New Yorker profile a few months ago. The story of a young artist’s development in Nazi Germany in the1940s, in Communist East Germany in the 1950s and then in free West Germany in the 1960s sounded, with its interweaving of biography, history and politics, almost too good to be true. It was, slightly, but I still recommend it. The three-hour-long film’s recreation of the past is faultless, and Caleb Deschanel’s photography is gorgeous; in those respects NLA is similar to Mike Leigh’s 2014 Mr. Turner, another mixed success for me, sumptuous, but suffering from a flawed script.

Von Donnersmarck’s first film, The Lives of Others, from 2007, was an astonishing début, comparable to Orson Welles’ 1941 Citizen Kane, and one of the best movies I have ever seen in its integration of art and politics. In it, a leftist playwright, played by Sebastian Koch, in Communist East Germany, is suspected of subversion by a dedicated Stasi agent, played by the late Ulrich Mühe, who spies upon him—and is gradually converted from rigid conformity to a humanist appreciation for beauty and ambiguity; sitting hour after hour, listening through headphones, he’s humanized. We almost feel humanized, watching him. When he helps save the playwright fro prison, he is discovered, and demoted. Ten years later, the playwright, having discovered the facts, dedicates a memoir to his benefactor, who is now sweeping streets; he sees it in a bookstore window. Fade out. That’s an ending worthy of the best Charles Chaplin: sentimental, moving, and profoundly human.

Unfortunately, Never Look Away, for all its plot contrivances (which I won’t spoil for you), and political melodrama and comedy, does not soar into filmic immortality in the same way. Kurt, the young protagonist is a born observer, but powerless and seemingly unaffected when his young ‘artistic’ aunt, given to spells of madness, is seized by the Nazis for sterilization and exterminaton. Members of his family die in the war, and after the war Kurt tells his father, a former teacher reduced after denazification to scrubbing floors, that everything is connected (echoing his aunt’s delusion) and that he need never worry; later, Kurt discovers that his father has hanged himself, a bit stolen from Philip Guston’s life, but not, to my knowledge, Richter’s. Kurt enters art school in East Berlin and soon becomes a star pupil, charged with an important Socialist Realist mural due to his professor’s efforts. Kurt betrays him when he flees to West Berlin shortly before the wall is completed, with his young wife, who has, shall we say, some issues with her gynecologist father (Sebastian Koch again), a former Nazi who has managed to stay undiscovered. We see the mural—and it’s not that great, for Socialist Realism: a bit too lumpish for officialdom, frankly—being whitewashed after the defection, and we’re supposed to feel—what? Genius is too good for this wicked world?

Given this richly tragic story, we might expect a fittingly triumphant ending, but alas, no. Kurt, faced by the artistic liberties of the west, embodied in the Joseph Beuys figure at Dusseldorf Academy, is reduced to creative paralysis, experimenting with meaningless avant-garde trickery (walking on and slashing canvases, which, according to his teacher, are “not you”) before finally sitting immobile at his easel for entire days. Salvation comes when he seizes upon old photos of himself with his doomed aunt in happier times and of his odious Aryan father-in-law (who might be reasonably expected to approve of Kurt’s blond Siegfried poster-boy looks); he grids the photographs and paints them in grisaille, then takes a dry flat brush and smears horizontal streaks across them, simulating the depredations of time and history. When a rich classmate exhibits the work, they are a sensation, and at the end, at the Wuppertal Kunsthalle, Kurt answers questions from the arty audience about his imagery—and lies: they’re nobody in particular, he says; it’s easier when I don’t know the people. As for doing more gray snapshots, no: I am interested in color charts now. It’s an oddly antiheroic, banal conclusion—no matter that it follows Richter’s career, but trivializes it— to what we might have expected; it’s as if there had been no discovery of Rosebud’s identity at the end of Citizen Kane. (There are, however, metaphoric choruses of bus horns, resoundingly linking the 1940s and the 1960s.)

Mine is a minority opinion, so see it for yourself. A lot of it is memorable, even astounding—particularly the recreation of the 1937 Degenerate Art show in Berlin, for which duplicates of lost paintings were made—and I look forward to the director’s next effort, even if, like Welles, or Shyamalan, he should turn out to be a one-hit wonder, which is not such a bad thing, in the big picture. As for including a Monkees-style montage of art-student hijinks, set to Francoise Hardy’s “Le Temps de L’Amour” (I had the album during my francophile phase), well, it was the Sixties, everywhere, and everything is connected.


Diego Rivera's Greater America

An edited version of this appears in TheDemocracyChain.org: https://www.thedemocracychain.org/dcheng0722


RIVERA’S GREATER AMERICA

My mural which I am painting now—it is about the marriage of the artistic expression of the North and of the South on this continent, that is all. I believe in order to make an American art, a real American art, this will be necessary, this blending of the art of the Indian, the Mexican, the Eskimo, with the kind of urge which makes the machine, the invention in the material side of life, which is also an artistic urge, the same urge primarily but in a different form of expression.
—Diego Rivera, 1940

The January 6 hearings have been a bombshell, exploding the myths of Trump’s patriotism, character, and competence for all to see—and for his MAGA-cult minions to deny with their usual alacrity. The ex-Trumper men and women who are finally coming forward to testify or to write tell-all books are being lauded by the excitable mainstream press as heroes; Adam Kinzinger, Rusty Bowers and Cassidy Hutchinson, braving threats to life and career do merit our respect; while Liz Cheney, William Barr, and a number of other published Trump apostates, however useful their current testimony, may have ulterior motives and should be considered heroes only qualifiedly. So why did it take the mob-and.mobster mayhem of January 6 to awaken these loyalists (some of whom bizarrely assert that they would still vote for Trump again,) who mocked the ‘woke’ liberals for four years, from their dogmatic slumbers?

The truth about Trump has been evident to anyone without rose-colored (or Rose-Garden-colored) lenses for decades. He’s a capitalist embodiment of the old Seven Deadly Sins, after all: Lust, Envy, Glutton, Anger, Sloth, Envy, and —hmmm, that’s six—oh, Greed. If there is one good feature about the horde of evils released by the Pandora of Trumpism, it is the exposure that—to quote Republican political operative Stuart Stevens’ 2020 book characterizing Trumpism as Reagan Republicanism on steroids, It Was All A Lie.

Any reader of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) —which should be required reading for high-schoolers, in an ideal, literate world—could have told us that before Reagan was elected, but the myth of American virtue and exceptionalism persisted in the mass mind and mass-media mind. Horatio Alger’s best-selling up-from-poverty-with-pluck capitalist versions of Dickens survive, despite the ‘concerning’ realities. Tucker Carlson, a day or two ago, touted his own estimable 90-hour-a-week work ethic—not crafting chicken pies for his Swanson-heiress mother, but polishing paternalistic moral tales for keeping the benighted both blessed with progeny and in debt: dependable wage slaves for the Masters of the Universe. Work for nothing, teens; show us your character.

If the United States is to prosper and even survive, mainstream Americans must shake off the toxic lie of Christian capitalist white supremacy. The demographics are on the side of a pluralistic, multicultural America; so are common decency and the real history of an immigrant America, not Hollywood tales of jut-jawed gunmen defending the “sacred American way of life,” to use Dubya’s felicitous term from 2001, against The Other. The last, final existential battle between equal and opposite contending forces/principles— good guys and bad guys—curiously never seems to be the the last, just the penultimate—or the one before that. There’s always a new clash of the titans when historical time (complex reality) gets morphed into mythic time (simplistic fantasy). Epic cosplay adventure time again!

The current exhibition of 150 little-seen artworks by Diego Rivera at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is entitled Diego Rivera’s America. That claim to sovereignty is a corrective to those of the flag-bearing European colonists of the New World that reflects the artist’s own background as a Paris-trained modernist who returned to Mexico to renew his affiliation with his homeland and its mestizo (mixed) culture. America for Rivera was the entire western hemisphere, “the territory included between two ice barriers of the two poles.”  The exhibit resurrects for younger audiences an artistic giant who merged sociopolitical convictions with compelling power and beauty. Rivera is an epic history painter (without the establishmentarian negative connotations of the word); his sprawling, packed murals, collapses and conflate eras and cultures, violating the time and space unities of classical historiography. While the exhibit includes large-scale videos of murals painted elsewhere, Rivera's colossal Pan-American Unity, or, The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and the South on This Continent, from 1940, on loan at SFMOMA until January from City College of San Francisco, should not be missed, either —as if the ten-panel, multi-ton, 22’ x 74’  panorama, mounted to the wall in the museum’s foyer, could be overlooked.


Take the time to take it in again. Mid-century murals like Rivera’s Pan-American Unity and Victor Arnautoff’s George Washington High School murals, the subject of political controversy in recent years, are artistic/historic time capsules in which San Francisco, liberal and tolerant (most of the time), is blessed—if we resist the desire to ‘cancel’ them for current political sins.  NelsonRockefeller ‘canceled’ Rivera’s 1932 New York City mural for depicting, amid the hordes populating Man at the Crossroads, that antichrist of capitalism and idol of 1930s communists like Rivera, V.I. Lenin. (By 1942,Rivera had concluded, after learning of pogroms and show trials: “Communist revolution has only one outcome: totalitarian dictatorship…. democracy is the only alternative….”)

Rivera’s universal history of the Americas is encyclopedic and maximalist; it’s almost a God’s eye view of the history of the New World. He includes the cultures (indigenous and Anglo-immigrant) and personalities that shaped the New World for centuries and those world-stage actors still important during the 1930s. The nameless weavers, miners, farmers, and other laborers whose contributions go unsung by history are here ennobled and commemorated, without the false pomp of Socialist Realism. Eminent persons of all kinds are included as well: the poet Netzahualcoyotl, king of Texcoco; Helen Crlenkovich, Olympic high diver, and Timothy Pflueger, San Francisco architect and Rivera patron;  the engineers and industrialists Albert Einstein, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, along with Samuel F.B. Morse and Robert Fulton, the last two painters as well as inventors; the political leaders Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln with their Mexican counterparts, Miguel Hidalgo and Jose Maria Morelos; the revolutionists Simòn Bolivar and John Brown; cultural figures like Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Edward G. Robinson, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Frida Káhlo, Emmy Lou Packard (one of Rivera’s assistants) at the easel, now the subject of a retrospective exhibition at Richmond Art Center), Frank Lloyd Wright, Maronio Magaña (sculpting the stone head of the Aztec Feathered Serpent god of sun, wind, air and learning, Quetzalcoatl), and Rivera himself; and even the dictators of the day, Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler—whom Chaplin jokingly chided for having stolen his tLittle Tramp toothbrush mustache and parodied as Adenoid Hynkel in his 1940 film, The Great Dictator. That film begins in satirical buffoonery and concludes with Chaplin’s little Jewish barber, disguised at Hitler in Nazi uniform, pleading across the airwaves for universal tolerance and goodwill. Democracy is the only alternative.

It’s a compendium of his past history, of his European artistic heritage and his love for working class people and his love of indigenous history. You know, I mean, it's all there. And his idea of progress and change, that it's not scary. For him, the idea of change is moving forward all together within this piece. To me, [the forbidding Aztec goddess] Coatlicue [at the center of the mural] is not just the earth. Coatlicue is the cosmos. In all its beauty and humbleness and its scariness, you know, which he does not shy away from. So, it it's really like, it is an exuberant, magnificent, life-affirming piece. — Yolanda López, Chicana artist and activist

Yeah, it is magnificent, it is beautiful. But it’s also really complex because it’s Rivera’s vision of this American continent shaped by similar historical forces, the Indigenous past, colonial history, but also this confidence in innovation and technology. Like a lot of his work, for me, this mural is, it’s just super optimistic: if we emphasize what we share more than what divides us, across ethnic or class or political borders, if we empathize, you know, we might actually achieve greater harmony, greater equality. It’s a utopian idea, of course, but it’s a very powerful one. —James Oles, curator of Diego Rivera’s America