Andrea García Rodríguez – Guatemala and Mexico: A Crafted Relationship

In 1924, the Guatemalan artist Rafael Yela Günther (1888-1942) was commissioned by the Mexican government to study native American art in the Museum of Folk Arts in Santa Fe, with the prestigious anthropologist Edgar Lee Hewett. Hewett’s methods were somewhat similar to those used by his Mexican colleague Manuel Gamio in Teotihuacán, where Yela had also worked years before. Based on these experiences, Yela developed a keen interest in Mayan art and indigenous craftsmanship, that became a focal point in his artistic projects, particularly the Guatemalan Palace for the Pacific Southwest Exposition, in 1928 (fig. 1-2). Textiles were a powerful and innovative source for thinking about technique and design. With their tactile qualities, they broke with the languages of concrete and firmness, typical of turn-of-the-century modernity, to evoke the fragility, movement, and malleability of their condition Gottfried Semper had already pointed out the great importance of textiles as a form of construction of the first human shelter spaces. Also, textiles had very clear connotations about identity and close ties with the tradition of certain indigenous populations. In this sense, it is fundamental to study the evocative capacity of textiles and the way in which they nourished the production of different Latin American artists such as the aforementioned Rafael Yela Günther and Alfredo Gálvez Suárez, a Guatemalan artist of a subsequent generation. This research aims to analyze the contact and learning routes of these artists with great exchange in Mexico and the United States; both moved to other urban centers to study and train, and later returned to Guatemala to develop projects that synthesized their transnational trajectories.

Andrea García Rodríguez is a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), focused on Modern Latin American art. She received her PhD and Master’s degree in Art History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She has a bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Language and Literature as well as Graphic Design. Her research addresses the intellectual and artistic trajectories in modern Latin American art, its relationship with popular culture as well as the networks that contributed to its discussion, circulation and collecting. Within this framework, one of her lines of study has been magazines and periodical publications. She is a member of the Permanent Research Seminar on Latin American Magazines (ESPIRAL) and is currently developing a project on muralism and graphics in Guatemala, Peru and Mexico from a transnational perspective. Between 2022 and 2023 she collaborated as a researcher at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City, where she led the curatorial and museographic renovation project of the Silver room. Some of her most notable publications are “The magazine Conozca Ud. A México and the views on popular culture from the writings of Josefina Zendejas and Alba Herrera y Ogazón”, chapter published in the volume Cultures of the press in Mexico, 1880-1940 (Mexico: UNAM, 2022), and “Readers of the new: changes in reading models based on avant-garde publications”, published in the book Proof of Transience. Contributions to the history of cultural journalism in Mexico, 20th century (Mexico: UNAM, 2023).