Untitled 

Arturo Rivera, a Mexican artist, painted this untitled work sometime before his death in 2020, using oil on canvas. The image presents us with a mother and child, but the dark hues and strange details seem to ask questions about motherhood itself. Rivera was clearly influenced by European Surrealism; the strange details—flies, disembodied scientific instruments, and geometric shapes—create a dreamlike landscape around the mother. The glowing child appears as an uncanny radiance, held within the womb. This relates to a long tradition of Mexican art, dating back to the pre-Columbian era, in which the boundary between life and death, body and spirit, are constantly crossed. Rivera seems to ask: what is birth, if not a kind of death? To understand Rivera's vision fully, we can turn to social histories of Mexican culture and religion, including the ways that both have shaped images of women. Rivera's art reminds us that the power of an image lies in the context in which it is created.