Join James Oles, PhD, for a close reading of Diego Rivera’s easel painting La Bordadora (The Embroiderer), which recently came to light after being lost for over 90 years. The painting depicts a woman on Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec embroidering a traditional huipil. The garment—a local product, painstakingly made in the home—was recorded on-site by Rivera with almost ethnographic accuracy. At the same time, it is an emergent symbol of Mexico’s post-revolutionary national identity, an embodiment of cultural mestizaje with Indigenous, European, and Asian roots. This lecture places La Bordadora in a rich, critical dialogue with overlapping and unexpected sources, from mass-market postcards to works by Frida Kahlo and Claude Monet.
LECTURE TICKETS
Tickets to this Friends’ Lecture are $15 for the public and $5 for OKCMOA Individual, Dual, and Fellow members. Reserve your tickets online or by calling 405.278.8237 to guarantee your seat.
EXCLUSIVE PRE-LECTURE RECEPTION
OKCMOA members at the Friend and Sustainer levels are invited to join us at 5 pm for a private reception prior to the lecture. RSVP to rsvp@okcmoa.com or 405.278.8207 to reserve your spot for both the reception and lecture. Click here to learn more about the exclusive benefits of becoming a Friend or Sustainer member!
MEET THE SPEAKER
James Oles, PhD, specializes in the history of modern Mexican art, with broad interests ranging from muralism to photography. His books include South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914-1947 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), which accompanied a traveling exhibition of the same name organized at the Yale Art Gallery, and Art and Architecture in Mexico (Thames & Hudson, 2013), the first survey of its kind in some fifty years. He was the curator of Diego Rivera’s America, an in-depth exploration of the artist’s work of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, which opened at the San Francisco Museum of Art (July 2022-January 2023), and traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (March-July 2023), and was seen by over 300,000 viewers. He edited the fully-illustrated scholarly catalogue that accompanied the show.
Oles received his BA (1984) and PhD (1996) from Yale University; he also holds a JD (1988) from the University of Virginia School of Law. He divides his time between the US and Mexico: he teaches in the Art Department at Wellesley College, and in 2002 was appointed adjunct curator of Latin American art at the Davis Museum, where he advises on exhibitions and acquisitions for the permanent collection. In 2019 he curated Art_Latin_America: Against the Survey, featuring 150 works by 100 Latin American and Latinx artists in the Davis Museum collection.
Besides Diego Rivera’s America, his ongoing projects include Mexichrome: Photography and Color in Mexico, the first comprehensive survey of color photography in the country, which opened at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, in November 2023, and Diego Rivera’s Heroes, a book of essays that will explore Rivera’s engagement with a wide variety of artists, including Giotto, Cezanne, Picasso, Kahlo, and Chaplin.
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Image Credit: Diego Rivera, La bordadora (The Embroiderer), 1928, oil on canvas, 31 5/16 x 39 3/16 in., The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund, 2022.45 © 2023 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photograph © The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Will Michels
