Reviving Mexico's groundbreaking muralism a century later

POXINDEJE, Mexico (AP) — A painter in orange overalls touches up the image of a hand holding a rifle while an artist perched on scaffolding painstakingly places bits of colorful ceramic in a mosaic of a guerrilla fighter.

The artists aren't just decorating a wall: Together, they are helping to revive muralism, a movement that put Mexico at the vanguard of art a century ago.

Just as their famous predecessors did shortly after the Mexican Revolution, teachers and students of the Siqueiros School of Muralism are on a mission to keep alive the practice of using visual imagery to share messages of social and political importance.

The mural in progress is on three walls of a municipal building in San Salvador, a small town of about 29,000 people north of Mexico City in Hidalgo state. The Siqueiros School is based in a converted elementary school in the nearby hamlet of Poxindeje, and one of its co-founders is Jesús Rodríguez Arévalo, a pupil of disciples of Mexico’s three muralism masters: Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco.

"The school is small, a humble space, but it is very serious and it is professional,” Rodríguez said.

One hundred years ago, Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco also started out at a colonial-era school-turned art laboratory. It was 1922, and they were charged with fulfilling the then-Mexican education minister's mission to take art out of the galleries and into public spaces. The plan, part of a national literacy campaign sponsored by the national government, transformed Mexico and permeated the entire continent.

The artists’ manifesto was to make “ideological propaganda for the good of the people” and give art “a purpose of beauty, of education and combat for all.”

They identified with the agrarian and proletarian revolutions and...