Modernism in the Borderlands: The Life and Art of Octavio Medellín

Abstract

This article examines the life and work of Octavio Medellín, a Mexican-born sculptor based in Texas during the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that Medellín was not simply a Mexican artist operating within the confines of an indigenist and nationalist art; neither was he a modernist primitivist artist committed to the search for pure form. As an emerging Mexican American subject located on the margins of both homeland and host society, Medellín synthesized the categories of Mexican art, regionalism, and modernist primitivism to produce an alternative modernism. Medellín's art reflects the bicultural complexities of becoming Mexican American in the United States—the appropriation and transformation of one's ancestral heritage while seeking cultural and political citizenship in a new land. Medellín's artistic journeying also underscores the multidirectional and transcultural origins of modernism during the 1930s and 1940s.