Issue 18: Workers, Arts, and Oligarchs

This issue traces the ongoing battle between workers and oligarchs for cultural and political dominance — what Gramsci calls hegemony.

It is great fight that rages from the factory floor to the art museum, from campuses to the countryside. At hand are questions of parties and programs, of consciousness and of collective struggle. And who could possibly illuminate such entangled threads as those of class society than Mexican muralist and leading figure of Mexican Modernism, Diego Rivera?

So this issue is, in equal parts, an investigation into the struggle for hegemony between classes—and a celebration of Diego Rivera’s counter-hegemonic art.

Rivera turned to monumental muralism in 1922 and, over the next three decades, painted the walls of schools, palaces, and museums across the Americas. His work was inherently political—contesting for control over public space and public life. His works used figurative realism to portray the clash of ruling and subaltern classes. Flattened, symbolic, sometimes crude—his style was never about photorealism. It was about clarity.

Commissioned by the post-revolutionary Mexican state to paint public buildings, he ridiculed the rich, raising the camposinos and his wife Frida as heroic instead.

In Detroit, at the heart of industrial America, Rivera blazed the workers of Ford’s River Rouge plant onto the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts—a temple of the bosses transformed into a critique of production.

At Rockefeller Center, in a building owned by a leading billionaire, in the lobby of the countries greatest radio broadcaster, he rendered in tremendous breadth the great battle between the forces of capitalism and communism.

Rivera drew capitalism raw as it lay before him, never losing sight of the alternative growing within it.

Editorial Board

Emma Buckley, Henry De Groot, Michael LeGore, Ruy Martinez

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