This is a study for the allegorical figure of “Song” from the mural in the Auditorium at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. Painted in 1922-3, this was Rivera’s first mural commission from José Vasconcelos, the Minister of Education whose progressive ideas about education and culture seeded the Mexican Mural Movement. Click here to read more.

Elena Climent has recently completed a mural commissioned by New York University that will be unveiled May 1, 2008 in the Languages and Literature building at the corner of 8th Street and University Place. The 10 x 30 foot mural is painted on six thematically connected panels which detail the lives, work and inspiration of New York authors Washington Irving (1783-1859), Edith Wharton (1862-1937), Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Frank O'Hara (1926-1966), Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) and Pedro Pietri (1944-2004).

The mural, which took 18 months to research and paint, is ingenious in organization and elaborate in concept and detail. According to Climent, the inspiration for the mural's composition was the Bayeux Tapestry in Normandy, "where the narrow and long embroidered narrative is accompanied by two strips: one on the bottom showing objects related to the story and another one on top with images of medieval fantasies about travel."

Climent's mural is painted in three levels: at the bottom level she paints the personal bookshelves of the different writers with books they read and wrote and includes some of their personal photographs and art prints. In the middle level is a view of the studio or room where the author lived and worked at some point. The actual writer is left out of the scene, both to give the impression that he or she will be back any moment and also to allow the viewer to imagine the possibility of walking into the room. The top of the mural shows scenes from the works of the writers and their rich New York imagery. The mural panels are done in chronological order, left to right. This allows the artist to show the change of writing tools from one author to the next, the styles of homes and decorations in successive periods, and the changes in how books have looked from the start of the nineteenth century until the present.

The mural is on view to the public daily, 24 hours. Click here for a larger view of the work.

Further information available from NYU Office of Public Affairs. Click here to view the NYU press release.