Lecture: Robin Owen Joyce, Cross-Border Solidarity: African American Artists in Mexico
Friday, September 11th | 6:00PM - 7:30PM
Lecture: Robin Owen Joyce, PhD
Cross-Border Solidarity: African American Artists in Mexico
Friday, September 11th, 2026 at 6:00PM
Mexico and Mexican Modernism’s influence on the Art of the United States has long been celebrated as a cornerstone of early-twentieth century American art. However, if we expand the timeframe of US-Mexican artistic exchange past the usual focus on the 1920s, we see a rich tradition of cross-border artistic training emerge as a strategy for artists dedicated to Black liberation in the United States. In this lecture, speaker Robin Joyce traces the forces that drew politically engaged African American artists like Elizabeth Catlett, John Wilson, Margaret Burroughs, Charles White, and Hale Woodruff to the printmaking workshops and muralists’ ateliers of Mexico City between the 1930s and the early 1950s. These artists found formal training and political solidarity in radical Mexican artistic communities even as Afro-Mexican people were often marginalized in the postrevolutionary Mexican state. In the hands of these artists, printmaking and mural painting, twin engines of postrevolutionary Mexican visual culture, became tools for consciousness raising and the transmission of radical histories.
This event is free and open to the public, but please register to reserve your spot!
Robin Owen Joyce is the Assistant Curator of Academic Engagement at the Baltimore Museum of Art. A scholar of American works on paper, his exhibitions at the BMA include Art/Work: Women Printmakers of the WPA and Deconstructing Nature: Environmental Transformation in the Lucas Collection. Prior to the Baltimore Museum of Art, Robin held positions in curatorial departments at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Morgan Library and Museum, among others. He has contributed to Print Quarterly, Art & the Public Sphere, and Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and his research has been supported by the Hauser and Wirth Institute and the New York University Public Humanities Initiative in Doctoral Education. Robin received his PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU.
Image Credit: Mitro Hood