Street art in Oaxaca includes graffiti, stencils, pasted prints, stickers, and more. Mural painting is a tradition with a deep history in Mexico, in general, and we can find many examples in Oaxaca.
Murals Celebrating the Revolution of 1910
- Yale University curricular units on Mexican and Chicano murals
- Tulane University unit on the three most famous Mexican muralists
- PBS, “The Storm that Swept Mexico,” about muralist
- PBS, “History Detectives: Diego Rivera’s Murals” about one of the “three great” muralists
- Denver, Colorado, K-12 curricular unit on Mexican muralism
- Slideshare slide show (27 slides) on the “Mexican Muralist Movement”
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Populist Art and the Mexican Mural Renaissance”
- Wikipedia article on Mexican muralism
Murals in Oaxaca
Indigenous women supporting the teachers’ movement (Photo, ASARO collective)
Mural in progress, designed by Vexta, from Australia. Skull and textures. Nov. 2013. No longer visible. (Photo, ASARO collective)
Student Projects
ASARO offers workshops to Mexican youth. They often create a design to project on a wall (indoors and outside), outline it, and have the students help fill in with colors. In this example below, César Chávez works with children of the bilingual (Spanish/English) Buena Vista Elementary School in Eugene, Oregon.
Mural on the cafeteria wall (Photo, S. Wood, 3/2014)
Detail, flute-playing jaguar (in progress)
The school mascot is a jaguar, and in art class student were making clay flutes the week César came to visit the school, hence the design he chose. The dancing jaguars recall Mexican folk dances with pre-Hispanic origins. César added lots of birds around the dual, dancing jaguars so that more and more students could participate and the wall could be filled more completely.
Projecting and outlining a mural element (Photo, ASARO collective)
ASARO obtains permission to paint on exterior walls. When not projecting, they might take a large stencil to get the outline of a design onto the wall. Students participate in the making of the stencil (especially, helping cut it out). And then the stencil is take to the street.
Stencil workshop (ASARO collective)
Stencil/mural workshop (ASARO photo)