Lederer Gallery
Member Reception and Preview: Friday | May 22, 2026, | 4–6 PM
This summer, the Academy Art Museum presents Under the Mexican Sky: A Revolution in Modern Photography, a compelling exhibition of over 50 vintage photographs created during a pivotal moment of artistic exchange between the United States and Mexico.
In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, Mexico became a magnet for artists from around the world—particularly American photographers seeking new creative direction. Drawn by the country’s light, landscapes, and vibrant cultural life, these artists produced work that would redefine modern photography. At the same time, Mexican photographers were shaping their own powerful visual language, contributing to a dynamic, cross-cultural dialogue that continues to resonate today.
Presented as part of the Museum’s Maryland 250–in celebration of the 250th Anniversary of America’s independence, the exhibition invites visitors to consider a broader understanding of “America”—one shaped not only within national borders, but through movement, exchange, and creative collaboration across them.
FROM THE CURATOR: MORE ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Under the Mexican Sky: A Revolution in Modern Photography, features works by influential American photographers including Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Helen Levitt, as well as their international contemporaries, Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others. Highlights of the exhibition include Edward Weston’s Chayotes (1924), an early palladium print that presages his later still life compositions of shells and peppers; Tina Modotti’s Bandolier, Corn, Sickle (1927), a politically charged still life. Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s La siesta de los pergrinos (The Rest of the Migrants) (1930s), Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Calle Cuauhtemoctzín, Mexico City (1934), and Helen Leavitt’s Mexico City (1941), are all superb examples by the artists and illustrate the “accidental theater of the street” captures by their cameras.
Like Paris in the aftermath of World War I, Mexico City after the decade-long Mexican Revolution (1910-1921) underwent one of the greatest artistic flowerings of the twentieth century and became a magnet for international artists and photographers. There, artists became close friends and freely exchanged ideas, equipment, and techniques, which often resulted in dramatic shifts in their artistic practices. During his three-year sojourn in Mexico between the years 1923 and 1926, Edward Weston completely reinvented his approach to making photographs. The soft-focus painterliness that had characterized his studio portraiture in the nineteen-teens melted away under the brilliant Mexican sun to be replaced by crystalline landscapes.
“The camera should be used for a recording of life for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself,” Weston wrote. “Whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh…I feel definite in the belief that the approach to photography is through realism.”
Thus, too, began his initial explorations in still life compositions—those of Mexican ollas and other domestic vessels—which would foreshadow his later compositions of shells and peppers.
Meanwhile, Weston’s paramour and protégé, the Italian silent film star Tina Modotti, had a similar transformation while in Mexico and created images that would place her among the great photographers of the modern era. Her politically charged compositions and membership in the Communist Party, however, would ultimately force her to leave the country, but not before influencing yet another artist—Manuel Álvarez Bravo, her close friend and protégé. In 1930, Modotti gifted Bravo her large-format view camera, which he would use to document everyday life in the streets of the city and go on to become Mexico’s greatest photographer. As with his mentor, Bravo befriended another photographer—the young painter-turned-photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson—who had come to Mexico to spend the year photographing in the brilliant natural light not often found in his native Paris.
“Cartier-Bresson and I did not photograph together but we walked the same streets and photographed many of the same things,” Álvarez Bravo recalled.
Lastly, the photographs by Helen Levitt taken in Mexico City in 1941 are a notable exception to her otherwise exclusive focus on New York City and its streets during her long career, which spanned the 1930s through 1970s. But the principal subject matter of Levitt’s work was the same in both cities: the lives of children in working-class neighborhoods. Levitt printed her Mexican photographs only after returning to New York, where they contributed to her fledgling reputation. Her first one-woman exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943 included sixteen photographs from Mexico.
This exhibition invites visitors to discover the rich history, landscape, people, and culture of Mexico just as experienced by the photographers themselves nearly a century ago–opening space for reflection on the ways cultural narratives are seen, shared and understood.
Under the Mexican Sky: A Revolution in Modern Photography is organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions. All works are from the collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.
RELATED PROGRAMS:
Artist Talk: Lisa Elmaleh | Saturday, July 25th, 2026, 5-7 PM | FREE & Open to the Public
Please join us at 5:00pm in the Selections Gallery for an opening reception, followed by an artist talk at 6:00pm in the Performing Arts room, where Lisa will discuss her work traveling along the U.S-Mexico border, documenting her experiences through photography, and volunteering with humanitarian aid organizations. Promised Land interrogates the myth of the American Dream from the perspective of the borderland environs, the people seeking asylum in the United States, and the volunteers and groups who are engaged in helping migrants with vital needs such as food, shelter, health care, as well as facilitating search and rescue in the desert. In dialogue with Under the Mexican Sky, this contemporary response highlights the dramatic shift in photography’s role as a form of expressive communication, and its striking ability to capture realities, both political and aesthetic.
*This exhibition is being offered together with a hands-on workshop in wetplate collodion photography on Sunday, July 26th, 2026. Space is very limited in this workshop, so please register early.
Mexico City of the 1920s and ‘30s was a vibrant cosmopolitan artistic center, drawing modernists from all over the world, including photographers from the United States. Histories of Mexican modernist photography often paradoxically begin with the Californian Edward Weston and Italian-born Tina Modotti, and the photographs they made in 1920s Mexico. Scholars assert these artists’ influence on Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who became Mexico’s pre-eminent photographer of the twentieth century. In turn, examples of Álvarez Bravo’s surrealist work circulated through exhibitions and journals, both at home and across borders, to influence another generation of artists. Rather than insist on photographic firsts and reify lineage, this talk considers the conditions that made Mexican audiences receptive to the modernist photographic aesthetic in the first place. It also examines the cultural revolution that inspired new photographic practices to develop within Mexico. In so doing, speaker Monica Bravo demonstrates the intermedial construction of Mexico’s revolution in modernist photography, beyond origins and across borders. The lecture will be followed by a book signing of, “Greater American Camera: Making Modernism in Mexico,” which will be available for purchase in the AAM Store.
Monica Bravo is Assistant Professor of the History and Theory of Photography in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She is the author of Greater American Camera: Making Modernism in Mexico, published by Yale University Press in June 2021. It was shortlisted for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. Her next book, “Silver Pacific: Early Western American Photography and its Mining Economy,” is under advance contract with Princeton University Press and has been supported by numerous fellowships. Her publications have appeared in the journals American Art, Art Bulletin, Art History, Art Journal, History of Photography, Modernism / modernity Print Plus, and Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, among other venues. Prior to Princeton, Bravo taught at Yale University, California College of the Arts, and the University of Southern California. She was the inaugural co-chair of Photography Network, a CAA Affiliated Society.
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.
During this one-of-kind evening, guests will sample a curated assortment of 6-8 different mezcal agaves from regions throughout Mexico, while experiencing One Says Mexico, a multi-channel radio opera in four movements by the Italian composer Steffano Scodanibbio (1956-2012).
Commissioned by the German broadcaster Saarländischer Rundfunk, One Says Mexico, originated as a musical, acoustical and literary portrait of Mexico in the form of a radio play in which soundscapes, guitar music and texts performed by 25 speakers are interwoven. A tribute to a country he loved and visited every year until his untimely passing, Scodanibbio’s fascination for Mexico grew out of his love for the poetry and writings of the beat generation. This dynamic soundscape, paired with small bites and small pours of mezcal, promises to be an experience you will not forget. Space is limited, so please register soon!
Mezcal, the national spirit of Mexico, has been distilled for a little over 400 years though there’s been an effort by archeologists and historians to trace it back to pre-colonial times. Closer to wine than any other spirit, mezcal easily pairs with a diverse array of foods and flavors. In Mexico, a mezcal shot will often be accompanied by salty, sour or spicy tastes, such as dried chili powders, green serranos or jalapeño peppers, pickled peppers and vegetables, oranges, limes, green tomatoes, tomatillos, cheese, dried beef, worms, ants, crickets, peanuts, and so on.
WORKSHOPS & HANDS-ON ACTIVITIES
Pressed Yarn Art: Connecting Culture with Art | Saturday, July 25, 2026 | 12-3 PM
Join Francisco (Paco) Loza for this interactive workshop to create your own piece of Pressed Yarn Art (Arte en Estambre) and learn more about this art form with connections to Mexican culture. Paco Loza is a Baltimore-based artist with two decades of teaching and exhibiting his artwork at museums, galleries, cultural centers, and universities. His artwork has been featured at exhibits and events at The AVAM Museum, Rehoboth Art League, Dorchester Center for the Arts, Spiralis Gallery, the Embassy of Mexico in Washington, DC, among other venues. In this workshop, Paco will give students a brief overview of the technique with connections to Mexican cultural traditions and inspire his students to create their own piece artwork. All materials provided.
Instructor: Francisco Loza
Student Age: (6th grade and above)
Max Enrollment: 12 students
Cost: Members $35 / Non-members $45
Location: Youth Studio
Lotería is a traditional Mexican game similar to bingo, but instead of numbers it uses illustrated picture cards that represent familiar symbols, characters, and objects from Mexican culture. In this workshop, families will get to design their own boards to represent their family’s culture. Once a family set is created, we will laminate them so you can take them home for your next family game night!
Reconnect with your earthy side! Take a deep dive into traditional pottery techniques and learn how to pit fire pottery in several class pit firings. Inspired by historic and contemporary native New Mexican ceramics, we will explore together the step-by-step, traditional coil-building and finishing methods to produce beautiful wood-fired functional and decorative ware. All materials are included.
Instructor: Loretta Lowman
Cost: $300 (Members) / $345 (Non-Members)
Supplies: $25 clay fee
Size: Maximum 8 students
Level: Beginner, no experience needed.
Contact email: lowmansculpture@gmail.com
Light is the essence of photography. The quality of Light is one of the things that drew early modernist photographers to Mexico. They understood the expressive functions of light, and used that to make consistently beautiful photographs. It is simply not enough to find your subject and record it. Understanding how light describes and reveals your subject should be of primary concern. Through a combination of lecture, technical demos, shooting excursions and group critique, students in this course will learn to identify and capture various types of natural light, while also paying careful consideration to content and composition. After a presentation on the technical and aesthetic qualities of natural light, students will be given a shooting assignment and sent into the community to make photographs. The class will end on Sunday with a group critique to show off images produced during the session.
Instructor: Matt Moore
Cost: $100 Members / $115 non-members
Level: Knowledge of basic camera operation will be helpful
Equipment: Please bring a DSLR or mirrorless digital camera if you have one
Contact: mmoore@academyartmuseum.org
McCoy Studio
Images:
Edward Weston (Highland Park, Illinois, 1886 – 1958, Carmel-by-the-Sea, California), Rosa Covarrubias, 1926, vintage gelatin silver print, 9 x 6 ¾ inches. Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. Image © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.
Tina Modotti (Udine, Italy, 1896 – 1942, Mexico City, Mexico), Bandolier, Corn, Sickle, 1927, vintage gelatin silver print, 8 ¾ x 7 ½ inches, Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.
Edward Weston (Highland Park, Illinois, 1886 – 1958, Carmel-by-the-Sea, California), Valle de San Juan Teotihuacán (From the Summit of the Pyramid of the Sun), 1923, vintage gelatin silver print, 6 ¾ x 9 ¼ inches. Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. Image © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.