The Festival of The Distribution of The Land 1924

This monumental mural by Diego Rivera captures a scene of land distribution in Mexico. It’s painted directly onto the wall of the Secretariat of Public Education Main Headquarters in Mexico City, so it's really part of the building itself. I imagine Rivera, up on scaffolding, mixing his paints, figuring out how to tell this powerful story across such a huge surface. The figures are tightly packed, a crowd of faces and bodies all vying for space, their muted colors adding to the solemnity of the moment. The people, their bodies, their faces, so many… Rivera must have thought about them, their lives, their stories. How do you capture all that in paint? The figures on the left and right are so close that the overall impression is of the masses overflowing, a sense of communal importance is conveyed with the distribution of bodies and faces. Rivera is in conversation with his contemporaries like Orozco and Siqueiros, as well as artists like Giotto and Michelangelo, all of whom pushed the boundaries of mural painting. It reminds us that art is always an ongoing dialogue across time, and that the paintings which we see now build on ideas and forms of expression.