This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| A pupil and assistant of muralist Diego Rivera in Mexico City, she completed public murals commissioned by the Mexican government and made revolutionary discoveries relative to fresco techniques.
Her first work with Rivera was recreating in Mexico his mural, "Man at the Crossroads," that had been destroyed out of protest in Rockefeller Center in New York because it had the image of Lenin.
To solve the problem of being unable to retouch a fresco after it had dried, she devised a formula using equal parts of butanol and water that could be applied with an airbrush every four hours to keep the plaster moist. She also created a method of grinding cadmium pigments fine enough so they could be used in frescoes. For these discoveries, she was heralded by Mexican and United States newspaper writers.
She became a close friend of both Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo, and they supported her Mexico City debut exhibition in 1935 of oil paintings and watercolors that were portraits of Indian women, children and landscapes.
In 1938, she returned to the United States but continued to correspond with Jose Orozco, muralist with whom she had become a close friend.
In the 1940s, she lived in California and painted murals including one for the Los Angeles's Sawtelle Psychiatric Hospital where she also practiced art therapy with the patients. Her landscapes and portraits became increasingly spiritual, and rooted in Biblical theology, were against the grain of the prevalent Abstract Expressionism. She became a forgotten artist both in America and in Mexico where she never returned. |
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