More on Oaxaca, Mexico and Art on the Street

(Please click on the photos to enlarge)

Here are the photos of the art on the walls of a small restaurant in Oaxaca Mexico called (I think) Nuovo Babel. I really like the sort of magical realism and graffiti/street art quality of these paintings and I'm sorry I couldn't read the name of the artist in the signature. I thought the wall of men in masks were meant to be superheroes, but the teacher in our art course, Mari Seder, tells me these are members of "Lucha Libre" a violent kind of masked wrestlers very popular in Mexico.

By the way, the title of the masked men painting is "odios" which I'm told means "hatred."

I can't get over how often the skeleton and the skull appear in contemporary Mexican art and folk art. The Mexicans have a completely different attitude toward death than North Americans. It's an accepted part of life--not to be feared. I think the skull on the mariposa (butterfly) indicates that death is just another phase of life, like the transformation of the caterpillar into the butterfly.

I am also posting four last photos that I took before leaving Oaxaca. These are all taken in the immediate vicinity of the beautiful church of Santo Domingo, near the studio where we spent most days of our art class (sponsored by the Worcester Art Museum.) In the last photo --taken to illustrate the amazing colors that you find everywhere in Mexico--the figures are our two instructors, Mari Seder and Humberto Batista, and one of our fellow students, looking into one of the shops on the side of Santo Domingo.

My next post will be about "Life, Death and Carnival in Puebla".