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Arte Popular features 100 pieces from Rex May's extensive collection of exquisite hand-crafted objects from all over Mexico. Coming from the reputable Mexican Museum, this volume demonstrates the dramatic power of folk art. This bilingual volume provides a veritable treasure trove of discoveries for the curious reader. * Features bold and atmospheric photographs * Includes scholarly essays that delve into the collection's origins and significance * A visual treat for lovers of Mexican art, craft, and visual culture This book is a companion to the opening of the Mexican Museum building in downtown San Francisco's Yerba Buena museum neighborhood.

Unlike many other handicrafts in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, which have long cultural and historical trajectories, Oaxacan woodcarving began in the second half of the twentieth century and has always been done for the commercial market. In The Value of Aesthetics, Alanna Cant explores how one family's workshop in the village of San Martín Tilcajete has become the most critically and economically successful, surpassing those of neighbors who use similar materials and techniques. The dominance of this family is tied to their ability to produce a new aesthetic that appeals to three key "economies of culture": the tourist market for souvenirs, the national market for traditional Mexican artesanías, and the international market for indigenous art. Offering a new analytical model by which anthropologists can approach visual aesthetics and conceptualize the power of artworks as socially active objects, The Value of Aesthetics shows how aesthetic practices produce and redefine social and political relationships. By investigating the links between aesthetics and issues of production, authorship, ownership, and identity, Cant shows aesthetic change to be a process that ultimately repackages everyday life into commodified objects in Oaxaca.

Your favorite childhood craft is back in a big way! With Art Makers: Papier Mache, you can learn to craft and create using papier mache-a fun, easy, and hands-on hobby that both kids and adults will love.

Mexico's love of celebration is well known, and cartonería, a kind of papier-mâché art, produces the objects that are essential to Mexican holidays and festivals, including Day of the Dead, Holy Week, and Christmas. Just about everyone knows what a piñata is, but few understand that it is part of an entire branch of traditional handcrafts. With more than 120 photos and bilingual English/Spanish text, here is the history of the craft, how it is woven through Mexican culture, and how the craft is growing and changing. Learn about the traditional objects made with the technique and their importance to Mexican culture. Look inside the studios of several artisans and consider not only the craft's strongholds in Mexico City and Celaya, Guanajuato, but also other areas in Mexico where it is expanding in creativity. A variety of artisans (more than 50 artists, museum directors, and other experts) help identify who the main drivers of this folk art are today, its relevance to modern Mexican culture, and where it is headed.

Since the mid-1980s, whimsical, brightly coloured wood carvings from the Mexican state of Oaxaca have found their way into gift shops and private homes across the United States and Europe, as Western consumers seek to connect with the authenticity and tradition represented by indigenous folk arts. Ironically, however, the Oaxacan wood carvings are not a traditional folk art. Invented in the mid-20th century by non-Indian Mexican artisans for the tourist market, their appeal flows as much from intercultural miscommunication as from their intrinsic artistic merit.

Increasingly prized by collectors worldwide, Oaxacan woodcarvings are among the most popular form of folk art available today. These fanciful, brightly colored figures created by rural Mexican woodcarvers reflect the myths and traditions still very much a part of the carvers' daily lives. A spectacular gallery of over 160 full-color photographs beautifully portrays these artisans and their work, while an informative text examines the intricacies of the carvers' craft. The only volume devoted exclusively to this distinctive and magical art form, Oaxacan Woodcarving will inspire and inform anyone with an interest in folk art, photography, or anthropology.

This book takes a generational look at the fast-changing world of the woodcarvers of Oaxaca, Mexico. These artisans became famous in the 1980s for their colorful novelty figures, a contemporary folk art that Shephard Barbash and Vicki Ragan documented in the book Oaxacan Woodcarvers. Fourteen years later, beginning in 2004, Barbash and Ragan returned to Oaxaca and discovered many changes in the lives of the woodcarvers they had known. Barbash effectively presents their personal stories in narratives drawn from interviews accompanied by Ragan's arresting black-and-white photographs of the carvers and their lives today. A series of diptychs of the same people taken in 1989-1990 and again fifteen years later are accompanied by extended essay-captions on the changing circumstances shaping their lives. Faced with a glut of carvings on the market, declining sales abroad, and an unsteady supply of tourists at home, a number of Oaxacan artisans put aside their craft to become mojados, or foreign workers, drawn by the economic opportunities north of the border. With eloquence and insight, the book puts a human face on bilateralism, a fancy term to denote divided souls. From the dusty villages of Oaxaca to the orchards of Oregon and the kitchens of Chicago, the carvers have joined millions of Mexicans who, unable to find good work or sustain their recent prosperity in their own country, have fled across the border: artisans and aliens. Changing Dreams is a moving story of change and survival, conveying the growing aspirations and changing dreams of a people struggling to catch up without leaving too much behind, whose creations we enjoy but whose lives we barely understand.

This detailed examination focuses on the artists and museums of Oaxaca, Mexico: a city and province celebrated worldwide by tourists, collectors, and art historians for its polished black pottery, colorful carvings of animals, fine textiles, world class museums and galleries, archaeology, and famous contemporary artists. Selma Holo looks in particular at how individuals and groups at national, regional, and local levels use museums to advance a particular view of history and identity. She clearly explains the way Mexico's pre-Columbian past has been represented, who has contested it, who holds the rights to Oaxaca's archaeological treasures, who has the authority to narrate the country's cultural history, who creates new museums and new mythologies about national and local identity, and many other intriguing subjects.