Murals/missing

Today in my sections I talked about this building, the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City, and Diego Rivera's fresco cycle there. This picture was taken three and a half years ago, right before I moved to Ohio to start graduate school.

I had no idea what I was getting into, of course, and certainly hadn't gotten as far as picturing attempting to get a room full of undergrads on a gray Minnesota morning to talk about what they could see in Rivera's vibrant images.

I also talked today about Roger Nelson's so-called Berlin Wall mural on the north wall of the K-Mart that was plunked in the middle of Nicollet in the 70s, reportedly to keep the riffraff from contaminating the fashionable avenue that is now Eat Street. There are no color pictures of the mural online; in fact, the only picture of any sort that I could find was a poor black and white reproduction in a journal article that, in the words of Moira Hall (whose letter to the editor was far more helpful), completely garbled the information. I used her information on the title and date (1978) on my PowerPoint slide; the pictures, I took this morning before class, on my camera phone. As of now, they are, sadly, the best ones online. If I'm going to be a real art historian, I think I need a real digital camera.

And to go back to Mexico.