During her research on primitive currencies and cultural cannibalism, Cuevas came across the Donald Duck comic book issue “The Stone Money Mystery,” where Donald goes on a quest to find missing museum objects. Cuevas’s America (2006) is a wall painting of a comic Donald Duck wallowing in a heap of gold coins, alluding to Mexico’s postrevolutionary mural tradition. The mural’s background is one of the earliest illustrations of flora and fauna in the American continent, juxtaposed with a reference to America as having bountiful natural resources available to be exploited, and the historical use of comics as ideological tools. The piece also recalls the politics of the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco filtered through contemporary narratives of identity, otherness, and power. Driven first by multiculturalism in the United States, then by globalization worldwide, this Disney reference also refers to the notorious book How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic , originally published during the Chilean revolution as Para Leer al Pato Donald before it was banned and burned. Writing from exile in 1975, the authors signed the preface to the English edition as follows: “Mr. Disney, we are returning your Duck. Feathers plucked and well-roasted. Look inside, you can see the handwriting on the wall, our hands still writing on the wall: Donald, Go Home!”
Minerva Cuevas’s socially engaged practice encompasses a range of strategies and mediums, including film, installation, performance, and site-specific public intervention. Cuevas aims to provide insight into the complex economic and political structures of the social realm, offering playful possibilities for their subversion. Often manifesting as small but poignant interruptions into the everyday realm, Cuevas’s modest acts infiltrate and disrupt economic and social systems, drawing attention to the aesthetics of popular imagery such as corporate branding, political symbols and slogans, and even comic books.
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
Stretching between San Pedro and the beach in Altata, Sinaloa, there is a 40 km road where there are three invisible borders controlled by rivalling armed groups...
Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive...
The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...
In his posters, prints, and installations, Erick Beltrán employs the language and tools of graphic design, linguistics, typography, and variations in alphabetical forms across cultures; he is specifically interested in how language and meaning form structures that can be misconstrued as universal...
Pablo Rasgado’s paintings and installations serve as a visual record of contemporary urban human behavior...
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
Pedro Reyes’s Los Mutantes ( Mutants , 2012) is composed of 170 plates that combine characters from ancient and modern mythologies...
In his posters, prints, and installations, Erick Beltrán employs the language and tools of graphic design, linguistics, typography, and variations in alphabetical forms across cultures; he is specifically interested in how language and meaning form structures that can be misconstrued as universal...
Pablo Rasgado’s paintings and installations serve as a visual record of contemporary urban human behavior...
In 1940 Rivera came to San Francisco for what would be his last mural project in the city, Pan-American Unity ...
First Born by Rachel Rose is part of a series of works titled Borns which expands on the artist’s longstanding interest in the organic shape of eggs...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
In Reyes’s words, “We should be able to extract the technological nutrients before we excrete our waste...
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
The Nightwatch , which is an ironic reference to the celebrated painting by Rembrandt, follows the course of a fox wandering among the celebrated collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London...
Donald of Doom Tank (2008) is a replica of a vintage metal toy with Donald Duck’s image one side and a soldier on the other...
Pedro Reyes’s Los Mutantes ( Mutants , 2012) is composed of 170 plates that combine characters from ancient and modern mythologies...
What ‘Pocahontas’ Tells Us About Disney, for Better and Worse - The New York Times Movies | What ‘Pocahontas’ Tells Us About Disney, for Better and Worse https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/16/movies/pocahontas-disney.html Share full article Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Disney’s animated achievements — certain ones — are imprinted on our brains, in part because the company reminds us about them seemingly nonstop...