Today's art history class concerned the performance of Holy Week ceremonies at Santiago Atitlan, where an ancient agriculturally-based narrative of transformation and regeneration is enacted using a veneer of Christian symbols.
After the break, we were joined by other students not in the class for a discussion of the tour yesterday at Na Bolom. One of the most interesting parts of the discussion was the issue of critique and the power relations involved, raised primarily by Rita, and the need to understand the ways in which the tour guide was limited to a role of mouthpiece for the museum narrative, which all found objectionable.
In the afternoon, Rita and I investigated the Museo de Culturas Populares to see if it was worth scheduling a class trip. It isn't. There was a display of paintings by José Osbaldo García Muñoz, born 1974, in the Mam-Maya speaking community of Unión Juárez, Chiapas. He is a self-taught painter and as his works are arranged chronologically, one can see a clear progression from a "magic realism" of ancient Maya themes, to surrealism, and then to cubism. The painting I include above is called Metaphor of the Sun.
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