Carlos Mérida and The Task of the Contemporary Indigenous Artist

Born in Guatemala City, Carlos Mérida was a multidisciplinary artist that critically influenced the portrayal of modern day Latin American art. While of mixed K’iche, Spanish descent, his movement to Mexico and stays in Europe facilitated an avenue for him to display a transnational aesthetic. Mérida’s prominence in Mexico resulted in his art being viewed through a multitude of Mesoamerican identities. This transnational viewpoint granted Mérida the ability to uniquely influence and propose cultural art and identity that was strictly anticolonial and displayed a strong sense of visual sovereignty. Decades later, contemporary Indigenous artists face similar structural challenges when establishing this sovereignty. In an age post colonialism, how does one go about the portrayal of indigenous culture? How does one maintain visual sovereignty while resisting the effects of the colonialists gaze? Who gets to dictate what is high valued art? What navigational framework can contemporary indigenous artists build from the movement and abstraction of Carlos Mérida?

During the 1920s, Mexican society was undergoing a critical transitional period following the decade long revolution. President Álvaro Obregón and his secretary of public education, José Vasconcelos sought to fundamentally reconstruct the views of the cultural identity in Mexico. He looked to embrace an institutional mestizaje culture, with an emphasis on placing importance and value on a curated, pre-colonialist indigenous past. This landscape functioned as a simmering pot of ideas from artists, poets, and writers looking to embrace the new found political and societal freedom. Carlos Mérida was amongst those seeking to embrace this age of expression. Merida moved to Mexico City after stints in Paris and Guatemala with a portfolio of paintings depicting Maya- K’iche women in tow. These paintings quickly gained popularity, establishing Merida as a stark contrarian to other nationalist art being created. While the state celebrated stone ceramics, heroic murals, and other ‘popular arts’ for their easily legible traditionalism, Mérida’s individual art stood alone. His art, to progressive critics, captured the essence of what makes ‘true’ traditional art through his abstract portrayals of indigenismo. However, with such a push for hyper-nationalistic literal representation of indigenous culture, Mérida was met with some criticism. One critic accused Mérida of bringing Eurocentric sensibilities into his paintings, styles such as modernism and cubism. This friction begged the question of how the contemporary blends with the past? What is deemed as traditional art, the portrayal of a culture?  Mérida’s inside, outside viewpoint, indigenous and avant-garde gave him a unique perspective of experiencing the culture while analyzing it abstractly. To read contemporary art is to read it through the context of the time it was created. At some point in history, every artist created based on their surrounding influences, and as time passes, the transnational experience continues to broadly influence the modern day artist. The contemporary Indigenous artist can utilize this movement as an act of rebellion. When faced with pressure formed by encroaching political narratives, Mérida soon displaced himself in the movement to carve his own path. His refusal to let outside perspectives dictate what his “indigeneity” should look like was an act of visual sovereignty. His art spoke upon itself, regaining control of a pre imposed narrative. Shifting away from physical or political constraints can allow artists to reclaim the essence of their own portrayal. 

Dialogue of the effect of eurocentrism did not begin nor end with Mérida. As this wave of art nouveau began being exhibited across Mexico, Europe, and the United States, there was an intense shift in attention and popularity. This ‘traditional art’ was now being considered artes populares or as decorative folk art. This shift in popularity introduced a subconscious pressure to contemporary indigenous artist psyche on how they should portray themselves and to whom is that catering to. Art that was popular at the time was a stylistic version of Latin America, in Mexico's case, the frequently depicted, market-friendly Tehuanas and Chinas Poblanas. Mérida resisted this self exotification by creating his art outside of its literal form. Drawing from the geometric and grid-like patterns of mayan textiles and architecture, he highlighted construction, color, and structure in his works. In a polemical text against thematic narratives in art, Medina explains “to make nationalist art we must use the essential part of our autochthonous art with our contemporary appearance and dealing, but not in its exterior form, that is to say theatrical, but in its essential, psychic form.” Aesthetic qualities were used as the portrayal of the subject's essence and the artist's expression. Moving away from the pictorial, literal portrayals of culture allows for the eluding of colonial, capitalist, expectations. Indigenous artists should reject the need to self exotify for capital. When indigenous art is turned into a popular commodity, this art is urged to be static, folksy, and hyper-legible. Merida disrupts this expectation by dissolving the easy to understand forms into high concept abstraction, thus demanding western audiences to engage with indigenous art as a high form of intellect.

To understand Carlos Mérida’s perspective is to understand his take on abstractism. Mérida was deeply inspired by cubism and “plasticism”, the latter championing pure abstract, fundamental geometric form, and primary color interpretations. In his portrayal of women is where his artistic ideals are used to navigate the exotification of Latin American women. Observe this painting below: