By
the 1930's, a number of well known Mexican artists and intellectuals who helped
inform this national aesthetic began collecting native Mexican popular arts as
a natural extension of their life interests, passions, and pursuits. Mexican painting
in particular, the public mural became a dominant vehicle of transmitting not
only a revolutionary consciousness, but a didactic tool in challenging the political
color hierarchy in Mexico. Indigenous cultures, history and peoples dominated
the emerging visual landscape appearing on the public walls of Mexico. Among the
artists who were critical to this emerging iconography and cultural reclamation
in post revolutionary Mexico were Saturnino Herran, Gerardo Murillo, known as
Dr. Atl, Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, Maria Izquierdo, Miguel and Rosa
Covarrubias, and, of course, Frida Kahlo.
