Curating Context: The Art Institute of Chicago’s 1945 Leopoldo Méndez Exhibition

Abstract

Abstract This article considers the exhibition of the work of leftist Mexican printmaker Leopoldo Méndez at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1945. Showing Méndez’s work in a manner that illuminated the artist’s communist loyalties could have been controversial in the postwar milieu, but the exhibition did not generate negative publicity. The professionals of the Art Institute, most notably Katherine Kuh and Carl Schniewind, perpetuated the invented populist legacy of printmaker José Guadalupe Posada to provide a folkloric and regional context for the work of Méndez. They thereby provided a reading that encouraged audiences to overlook the contemporary leftist political importance of Méndez’s work, and made the prints palatable to an audience that might otherwise have reacted strongly to the work of a communist Mexican artist at a time when the Good Neighbor Policy had come to an end and the Cold War had begun. This case study, the dynamics of which were repeated at parallel exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, exemplifies the crucial challenge of the curatorial representations that have not problematized the context of the artistic narratives that they present.