Mexican Art Research Articles

The viscosity of grief: Teresa Margolles at the scene of the crime

This essay considers the possibilities of collective political mourning through Mexican artist Teresa Margolles's 2009 contribution to the Venice Biennale, De Que Otra Cosa Podríamos Hablar? (What Else Could We Talk About?). The author posits that our prevailing notions of grief and mourning rely upon a stable conception of single human subjects whose loss can be narrativized. This, the author argues throughout the essay, limits the possibilities of political action by restricting mourning to subjects who have a biography. He then takes the use of objects, fluids, and other materials in Margolles's installation to challenge what Judith Butler refers to as the narcissism of mourning. The author suggests that Margolles's piece reconsiders how matter functions as the very tissue that allows us to critique violence. He then turns toward Gil Anidjar's critique of the political history of blood in order to show the ways in which the presence of blood in the work allows us to disentangle the subject of violence from biographical subjecthood, thus expanding our capacity to engage mourning as a political act beyond single bodies.

Kunst, køn og nekropolitik

The concept of necropolitics, launched by Achille Mbembe in 2003, has had an increasing influence within various disciplines but not within arts, aesthetics and cultural studies. This is the point of departure for my article, which simply wants to address the following questions:What does a contemporary necropolitical art look like? My exemplary case is Mexican artist Teresa Margolles. In her work Lote Bravo (2005) she deals explicitly with a feminicidio that ‘officially’ began in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 1993 (since then the killings of women have not only continued but spread to the rest of the country). It is tragically clear that these killings of young women crystallize a cruel combination of capitalism, gender and death. Using spatiality, mediality and affectivity as a conceptual triad for analyzing this particular work and drawing upon the thinking of Judith Butler, I will show how Margolles re-frames (the representation of) the tragic event, which is what enables an aesthetic production of grief with real political effects.

Art and Architecture in Mexico

This book is a timely contribution to the literature in English about Latin American art. It is the first extensive English-language survey of Mexican art since Joshua Taylor's translation of Justino Fernández's book Arte mexicano, de sus orígenes a nuestros días (1958), published as A Guide to Mexican Art (1969). The later compendium Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries (1990), released in connection with the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition of the same title, covered select Mexican works from antiquity to the first half of the twentieth century and is now out of print.In contrast to these precedents, James Oles's book concentrates on the art of colonial and independent Mexico to the exclusion of ancient Mexican art. This decision fits within recent developments in the history of art that stress the specificity of each region and period of Latin American art. Oles extends this approach to illustrate the diversity of Mexican art within Mexico by covering artistic production not only in Mexico City but also in regional areas. Simultaneously, the book acknowledges the field's attention to globalization by analyzing Mexican art in relation to a multiplicity of international styles and tendencies.Art and Architecture in Mexico is well researched and effectively summarizes and elaborates on the relevant scholarship in the history of Mexican art. The author presents the material chronologically, illuminating his formal analysis of the artworks with references to pertinent social and political issues. This book is exceptionally strong in its coverage of modern art, especially for the period from 1960 through 2000, including sustained discussions of abstract, conceptual, and performance art as well as artists' collectives, which to this date are understudied. The breadth of the artistic material, the solid documentary foundation, and Oles's clear and engaging writing style make this volume an excellent resource for introducing undergraduates to the history of Mexican art.Because Oles recognizes that Mexican art developed within global networks, he proposes to turn from the “pervasive” theoretical framework of mestizaje that scholars have used to describe the integration of indigenous with Spanish artistic traditions to the more inclusive concept of hybridity (pp. 10–11). In his opinion, hybridity functions as a capacious term that includes not only Aztec and Spanish but also other European artists as well as slaves, merchants, artisans, travelers, and émigrés from various parts of the world (p. 11). While this reasoning is clear, in the rest of the book Oles seldom mentions hybridity explicitly, except in relation to the art of the sixteenth century. In this section, he asserts that cultural hybridity mirrors racial hybridity (p. 21). In the remainder of the book, the reader is left to infer hybridity from his explications of the artworks, which do not reference the original theoretical frame. For example, in a section on casta paintings, the discussion focuses on the phenomenon of racial mixing, with acknowledgment of some of the works' European pictorial sources but with no direct reference to hybridity. The relationship of both mestizaje and hybridity to race is complicated as Oles later identifies neocolonial architecture from the early twentieth century as a perfect expression of mestizaje (p. 236).In his famous essay “Indianism, Mestizaje, and Indigenismo as Classical, Medieval, and Modern Traditions in Latin America” (1966), George Kubler forcefully critiqued the application of the concept of mestizaje to art on the grounds that it was a “racialized expression.” To Kubler, race and art were incommensurable categories. In his book The Mestizo Mind (1999), historian Serge Gruzinski explains mestizaje as Spanish and indigenous mixtures but limits its use to the sixteenth century. Considering these understandings of mestizaje, Oles is justified in thinking the term too restrictive to describe Mexican art, but surprisingly, he expresses no reservations concerning hybridity.The concept of hybridity has been subject to volumes of critique since the mid-1980s, mostly in response to writings by Homi K. Bhabha later reprinted in the collection The Location of Culture (1994). In the celebrated essay “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America” (2003), the art historians Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn eloquently argued against the utility of hybridity as a descriptive term for colonial Latin American art because, like race, it failed to illuminate anything but surface phenomena, leaving invisible and essential aspects of artistic practices, such as labor, unexamined. Oles mentions this article in a bibliographical essay (p. 412) but fails to engage with it in the text. Addressing at least some of the previous critiques of both mestizaje and hybridity would have strengthened this book's theoretical frame. These omissions do not diminish the book's considerable didactic value. Rather, they raise the question of whether a theoretical gesture without expansion adds anything to a substantial survey text.

Mexico on the Skin

A sweeping psychological narrative of a young woman's descent into delusion, extreme sexual behaviour and self-destruction, the film Leap Year (Michael Rowe, 2010) chronicles twenty-nine days in the life of Laura, a journalist who moved from her rural background in the Mexican province of Oaxaca to Mexico City. As the film is so steeped in the subtleties of local racism, the article reads the film in relation to the discussion of gender and racial politics in contemporary Mexico, especially in the light of multiculturalist state reforms. The article also addresses the discussion of female-racialised aesthetics by tracing back the politics of representation of the female indigenous body in Mexican art, and the way this body has acted as an allegory of the motherland in line with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist ideology. The author argues that in Leap Year the female indigenous body is still a field of political and semantic tension, yet, due to the film's script and aesthetics, its protagonist's body does not act merely as a figure that embodies a corpus of ideology: its polysemic activation is evident due to its performativeness.

Dada and Surrealism Faced with Colonialism

Dada and Surrealism Faced with Colonialism Martine Antle (bio) Despite the numerous exchanges and multiple echoes between dada, surrealism and other cultures, European surrealism rarely took hold abroad, whether in the diasporas or in the United States. A fundamental question posed in 1997 by Henri Béhar is still relevant today: did surrealism support non-European cultures or was it simply inspired by them in a universal, non-culturally specific way?1 A first approach to answering this question consists in revisiting the political views held by André Breton and other members of the surrealist group, including those who, like Breton, were first involved with dada. There is no doubt that Breton and other surrealists consistently spoke out against colonization and oppression. Even though it was absent from the first two “Manifestoes of Surrealism,” criticism of colonialism truly marked the history of the movement. The surrealists took strong positions against colonial domination, particularly by France, with regard to a variety of former colonies that gained independence over the course of the twentieth century, including Indochina, Algeria, Haiti and Martinique, and also Cuba. But what happened when surrealism found itself confronted with other cultures? Did surrealism truly engage with those cultures? What did it make of the range of cultural particularities and political realities the surrealists encountered in their travels? When compared with recent studies on post-colonialism, surrealism’s ideological position loses moral power because it remained essentially self-involved and disengaged with the specific struggles and needs of the people they had hoped to inspire. The greatest impact their interactions with distant cultures had was on themselves; what they sought most was confirmation of their own ideas and aesthetic ideals, which they often found more readily abroad than at home. For despite their faith in their ideology of liberation and their immense and openhearted fascination with other cultures, the surrealists often saw those cultures as exotic objects rather than collectives of real human beings with whom they might productively enter into true dialogue. For example, Mexico struck Breton as magical and a place of true revelation because it appeared to him as an idyllic version of a place in the world that he had previously only imagined. Mexico confirmed Breton’s own vision of surreality. It was in pursuit of this vision that he had traveled [End Page 116] there. Unfortunately the surrealists rarely heard the writings and sentiments coming from the cultures they admired fully, except insofar as those writings and sentiments confirmed their own ideas. In terms of surrealist production, the corpus of texts dedicated to territories outside of Europe remains relatively meager. Breton’s journeys to Prague, Haiti, or Mexico were motivated primarily by political exile, meetings, conferences, or exhibitions, which he attended with missionary zeal and the intention of bringing the surrealist world to the uninitiated. Another case in point— Antonin Artaud’s initiatory voyage to Mexico was planned as a voyage of spiritual discovery for himself and his search for a new “truth” to be used for the benefit of his own psychic growth and then brought back to France for the purpose of transforming his own culture rather than for the purpose of staying and engaging more fully with Mexican culture, the way fellow surrealists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo did.2 These two friends developed their own strain of surrealism while living in Mexico and engaged fully with a community that was inclusive of Mexican artists and writers in addition to their own ex-patriot circle of friends. Their work flourished well beyond the fleeting influence that Breton exercised around the time of the international exhibition of surrealism in Mexico City in 1940. Where surrealism had a definite impact was on poetry and art produced by writers and artists in other countries, as examples of cross-fertilization and cultural exchange confirm. But these exchanges were predominantly artistic and not political and did not find their way into the movement’s representative political texts. As a result, the internationalization of the movement and its aftermath abroad raises once again the question of “importation” of a European movement into a foreign land. And we also have to take into account the obvious linguistic...

Hacia una teoría de la literatura de vanguardia en México

Este ensayo, antes que presentar una teoría del arte de vanguardia en México, pretende acercarse a algunos de los problemas que le incumben a los estudios literarios. En la primera parte aparece una síntesis de las teorías del arte de vanguardia más difundidas; en la segunda, se contraponen un par de acepciones de “autonomía del arte”. En la tercera parte se aprovechan los conceptos de las secciones anteriores para ponderar su pertinencia al hablar de literatura de vanguardia en México. Más que conclusiones, lo que se busca son las interrogantes que permitan configurar investigaciones ulteriores.

Frida Kahlo. Retrato de la artista como esposa empresaria

A pesar de que Frida Kahlo ha encontrado un nicho en la cultura popular, poco se ha comentado sobre su papel como “esposa empresaria”, esa variedad de mujer cuya misión consiste en promover la carrera de su marido, anticipando sus necesidades cotidianas y explicando el talento y la personalidad controversial de su esposo a otros. Sin embargo, existe un legajo de cartas escritas por Kahlo dirigidas a la filántropo Abby Aldrich Rockefeller durante 1932-33 que revelan que la artista mexicana no estaba reacia a desempeñar el papel de la esposa servicial, intérprete, secretaria particular, benefactora y compañera de Diego Rivera. Conocedora del inglés y acostumbrada a escribir cartas, Frida le escribió a la señora Abby Aldrich Rockefeller acerca de los avances de su marido, para darle la crónica de sus vidas y el desarrollo de los frescos. Ella tenía también cierta habilidad para escribir cartas acarameladas de agradecimiento a la señora Rockefeller por sus regalos de flores y fotografías. Las cartas de Kahlo señalan gran desconfianza personal hacia su propia obra, la cual describía como “horrible” y “absolutamente espantosa”. A pesar de ello, los retratos que pintó en ese periodo, que Rivera describió como “poesía sobre lienzo”, son de sus trabajos más respetados y reproducidos.

Mexican Art Today: Inés Amor, Henry Clifford and the Shifting Practices of Exhibiting Modern Mexican Art

In 1935, the Galería de Arte Mexicano opened in Mexico City to advance modern Mexican art. Director Inés Amor developed relationships in the United States to build a transnational network for her artists. Mexican Art Today, a 1943 exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, highlights characteristics of Amor’s curatorial project. Collaborating with curator Henry Clifford, Amor assembled an exhibition that reframed modern Mexican art for US audiences, shifting attention from muralism to easel painting and presenting contemporary achievements without historical and popular contextual examples. Studying Mexican Art Today elucidates the important role played by Amor in shaping the understanding of Mexican art in the United States.

‘Where’ Else Could We Talk About?: The Border as Nomadic Site

Since 2005, Mexican artist Teresa Margolles has created a number of installations that address the drug- and gang-related violence that has plagued Mexico’s northern border for the last two decades. Many of these artworks also share a decidedly spatial quality, as Margolles has physically transported material traces of criminal acts to secondary sites. Such site-oriented and performative techniques allow Margolles to present the border as ‘nomadic’, an unhinged site-specificity that widens the scope of the artist’s inquiry from the direct experience of the actual space itself to investigate a larger discourse on the border. This article analyzes Margolles’s What Else Could We Talk About? (2009), curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Through a theoretical framework of aesthetic and philosophical nomadism, I argue that the exhibition functioned as a critical intervention in producing the border as a space of social, political and institutional critique.

Manuel Maples Arce, Salvador Novo, and the Origin of Mexican Vanguard Autobiographies

This article brings into dialogue Manuel Maples Arce’s manifesto “Actual N°-1” (1921) and Salvador Novo’s short narrative piece, El joven: ¡QUE MEXICO! Novela en que no pasa nada (1923), two of the first pieces of vanguard writing in Latin America. Although the two authors belonged to competing Mexican vanguard groups (Maples Arce was an Estridentista and Novo, a Contemporáneo) the article argues that these two early pieces inspired the Estridentistas and Contemporáneos alike; it also explores the similar devices of the two authors. In these early texts Maples Arce and Novo borrow slogans from advertising and politics, voice doubts about state-sponsored modernizing projects, the Mexican revolution and its legacy. Furthermore, both utilize protagonists that are veiled versions of the authors themselves, wandering the streets of Mexico City and pondering the role of the Mexican artist in the wake of the Revolution. Many critics have failed to credit the Estridentistas and the Contemporáneos for their original contributions to Mexican and Latin American literature, criticizing them for parroting tropes from European movements or for failing to relate to their own social and political context. This side-by-side approach to the Estridentistas and Contemporáneos, however, reveals a distinctly Mexican aesthetic that emerged in Mexico between 1921 and 1929, suggesting that a distinctly Mexican vanguard form—the experimental autobiography—emerged in Mexico during the 1920s. Finally, the article proposes that Maple Arce and Novo’s early texts influenced vanguard authors not only in Mexico, but throughout Latin America.

Diego Rivera: Painting and Partisanship

In using key texts of Marx and Engels against all dogmatic schools of Marxism, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez accomplished a major theoretical shift by revalidating ‘modern art’ from within the Marxist tradition, so that ‘socialist pluralism’, and not any single doctrine of ‘social realism’, seemed most consistent with the vantage point of Marx. Sánchez Vázquez wrote significant art criticism about the murals of Diego Rivera in which he deftly applied his concept of non-normative Marxism. Remaining focused on Rivera, in this article Sánchez Vázquez concentrates on the characteristics and deliberates the roles of political art. The author examines how and why Rivera's artwork is political in nature and cites a diverse range of evidence to make his point. Sánchez Vázquez also evaluates the aesthetic quality of Rivera's work and makes connections between the Mexican artist and Pablo Picasso, Francisco Goya, Eugène Delacroix and Honoré Daumier.

Art and Revolution in Mexico

This special issue of Third Text on Art and Revolution in Mexico stems from the editors' ongoing interests in, explorations of, and dialogue with Mexican art. It is dedicated in loving memory to Da...

The Revolution, Vanguard Artists and Mural Painting

This article examines the development of Mexican art after the Mexican Revolution. This text identifies and investigates historical figures, vanguard art movements and artists who have contributed to the development of Mexican art in general and Mexican Muralism in particular. By considering how the Mexican civil war enabled the convergence of interests of both the state and artists and examining developments in vanguard Mexican art of the twentieth century, the author invites rethinking about whether mural painting was or was not official or state art.

Dialogues along a North-South Axis

This article examines commonalities and differences between the literary and artistic avant-gardes in Mexico and Peru during the 1920s, as well as instances of direct exchange between Mexican writers and artists and Peruvian exiles in Mexico. It traces the ways in which works of literature and art conceptualized the avant-garde in relation to modernity and/or social justice. Debates around contemporary aesthetics, especially the perspectives of José Carlos Mariátegui and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, are addressed, as are the Mexican avant-garde movements Estridentismo and ꜟ30-30!.

La literatura y el arte modernistas: el erotismo mortificante en México

At the end of the nineteenth century, the naked body was the aesthetic representation of a moribund era. Pleasure took on special meaning as modernity forced the artist to enter the commercial and industrial world. The modernists portray the most disturbing aspects of modern life: sex-temptation and death are intertwined; Eros and Thanatos become sides of the same coin. Bernardo Couto Castillo (poet) and Julio Ruelas (painter), two Mexican modernist artists, use allegory and irony to express their revulsion for a dictatorial regime in decline. From literature and the arts, Mexican modernismo symbolizes the decline of the era by utilising feminine sensuality as the aesthetic representation of uncertainty and the negative transformation of existence: the gloomy, the hideous, the demonic, disease, transgression, death.

Lineages of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1940)

This article articulates the significance and multiplicity of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and its legacies and sets the stage for this special issue on Art and Revolution in Mexico. In particular, a line is drawn between scholars who examine and contribute to the comprehension of the diverse nature of the war and its legacies and revisionists and neo-revisionists who have a more singular approach to the rebellion and its narrative. An interrogation of problematic frameworks that have been applied to Mexican history and art history includes: the Caudillo (or great man) based conception of history, the Corporativist model of state patronage, and a structuralist/post-modernist model. As part of his critique the author discerns major structural and institutional changes that occurred between 1910 and 1940 that were unique to Mexico, including the Constitution of 1917, separation of Church and State, a national literacy campaign, and agrarian land reform.

El Taller de Gráfica Popular and the Chronicles of Mexican History and Nationalism

This article addresses the constructions of Mexican graphic art history. In particular, a select group of recent exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues will be examined in relation to the narrative development of Mexican graphic art. How El Taller de Gráfica Popular (The Workshop for Popular Graphic Art) or TGP, a graphic art collective founded in Mexico City in 1937, is situated with Mexican art history is a primary concern of this article; it also addresses the significance of the Mexican Revolution to the TGP. In particular, this article analyses two prints by TGP member artists from the 1947 portfolio Las Estampas de la Revolución Mexicana (Prints of the Mexican Revolution) with a focus on the graphic collective's approach to narratives of the war.

Art and architecture in Mexico

This new interpretive history of Mexican art and architecture from the Spanish Conquest to the early decades of the 21st century is the most comprehensive introduction to the subject in fifty years. James Oles ranges widely across media and genres, offering new readings of paintings, murals, sculptures, buildings, prints and photographs. He interprets major works by such famous artists as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, but also discusses less familiar figures who were equally important in the construction of national identity. The story of Mexican art is set in its rich historical context by the books treatment of political and social change. The author draws on recent scholarship to examine crucial issues of race, class and gender, including an exploration of the work of indigenous artists during the colonial period, and of women artists in the 19th and 20th centuries. Throughout, Oles shows how artists in Mexico participated in local and international developments, and highlights the important role played by Mexicans in the art world of the last five centuries.

Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War

In Making Art Panamerican, Claire Fox explores the shifting institutional landscape behind mid-twentieth-century attempts to create a unified artistic tradition in the Americas. She inscribes these attempts within the longer history of Pan-Americanism— formulations centered on the perceived or desired unity of the culture and history of the hemisphere’s diverse nations—which spans the last two centuries. Fox’s four chapters combine a keen analysis of an impressive array of archival sources with a lucid interpretation of artworks. The thread that connects the chapters is the career as a cultural bureaucrat of the Cuban-born José Gómez-Sicre (1916–1991). Gómez-Sicre’s career began in the Visual Arts Section of the Pan American Union (PAU), an office founded in 1910 in Washington, DC, by a series of governments of the Americas and that became the Organization of American States in 1948. US–Latin American cultural relations, a priority for the US government during World War II, became a more ambiguously defined prerogative at this early Cold War moment. Socially committed artistic movements, some of which challenged US cultural dominance, also became increasingly visible throughout the Americas. “Gómez-Sicre’s trajectory from progressive social democrat and communist fellow traveler to cold war liberal,” a transformation that took place as he navigated this scenario, serves as a foil for Fox’s compelling analysis of “the generational impact of the cold war on Latin American intellectual and cultural sectors” (pp. 20–21).Among the many notable episodes that Fox examines is Gómez-Sicre’s participation in the triangulation of artists and institutions in Havana, New York City, and Mexico City that lay behind the completion in Havana of then-exiled David Alfaro Siqueiros’s mural Allegory of the Equality and Confraternity of the White and Black Races in Cuba (1943). Fox shows how this embattled commission underscored tensions between Gómez-Sicre’s simultaneous sympathy for socially committed art and his desire to sponsor art with such universal value that it could transcend national contexts and become part of a hemispheric canon. Similar tensions animated Gómez-Sicre’s Exposición Interamericana de Pintura Moderna, a survey of Latin American art organized in 1948 in Caracas to commemorate the inauguration of democratically elected Venezuelan president Rómulo Gallegos, and its successor exhibit, the traveling show 32 Artistas de las Américas (1949– 1950), which Fox describes as likely the “first traveling exhibition consisting primarily of Latin American art organized for Latin American viewing publics” (p. 117). Backed by corporate funding tied primarily to US interests and supported by local Latin American government agencies, these shows attempted to fuse the perceived universalizing ethos of modern art with a developmentalist praise of liberal democracy and modernization, a melding together of aesthetic and political agendas that defined much of Gómez-Sicre’s oeuvre.In chapter 3, Fox provides a remarkable analysis of the rise to international prominence of Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas, which was significantly aided by a show of his work organized by Gómez-Sicre at the PAU in 1954. The defining aspect of Cuevas’s rise was his critique of the official art of Mexico, chiefly mural painting, as exemplified in his 1956 manifesto “The Cactus Curtain.” Cuevas’s rise is well documented, yet Fox adds substantially to its study by examining his “fluency in the languages of cold war universalism at the PAU and the urban cosmopolitanism of his Mexican coterie” (p. 139). Similarly enlightening is Fox’s analysis in chapter 4 of HemisFair ’68, the Pan-Americanist-themed world’s fair celebrated in San Antonio, Texas, in 1968. Fox illuminates the extent to which this fair, focused heavily on celebrating US-Mexican cultural dialogue at this border location, was influenced not only by local and international racial and ideological divisions but also by officially endorsed formulations of mestizaje, or cultural mixing, emanating from Mexico.Making Art Panamerican is an accessible text, and it contributes substantially to at least three current trends in scholarship. It offers much to recent studies of the Latin American Cold War, which characterize the region not as a passive recipient of superpower interventions but as a complex terrain of conflicts with global repercussions. It also adds to studies of Pan-Americanism’s multilayered cultural impact, and it is arguably the most significant contribution to this field to date. Thirdly, it contributes to the expanding literature on the governmental and institutional patronage of twentieth-century art in Latin America. With impeccable archival zeal, Fox demonstrates that evolving notions of a hemispheric artistic tradition as formulated during the Cold War and the idea of Latin American art as we know it today are powerfully interconnected. As such, her book is necessary reading not only for those interested in twentieth-century politics and culture but also for anyone involved with the expanding terrain of teaching and research in the visual culture of the Americas.

Imaging conservation: Sea turtle murals and their effect on community pro-environmental attitudes in Baja California Sur, Mexico

Public art in Mexico has historically served as a platform for protest and social commentary. The purpose of this action research was to document sea turtle murals throughout Baja California Sur (B.C.S.), Mexico and to better understand the potential relevance of public art as an impetus for fostering pro-environmental attitudes, and the extent to which murals are a useful tool in efforts to protect the marine environment and the recovery of endangered species. Through qualitative research, we conducted 333 surveys and interviews with both adult and student participants in nine B.C.S. communities. Through descriptive narratives of participant responses, and Type I tabulations, we found evidence of outcomes that sea turtle murals may have in relation to respondent environmental attitudes about support for marine protections and the recovery of endangered species of sea turtles. Unexpected results from semi-structured interviews with respondents pointed weakly to the potential for murals in helping to shape pro-environmental behaviors towards the treatment and recovery of endangered sea turtles. The results of this action research may provide useful insights for improving management practices during future efforts to protect and restore marine environments and endangered species. That is, public participation in strategically placed community accessible art, may prove to be a valuable and innovative component of a broader suite of outreach and education initiatives used for bolstering community responsibility and empowerment for conservation of the marine environment.