Art - Overview
The National Museum of American History is not an art museum. But works of art fill its collections and testify to the vital place of art in everyday American life. The ceramics collections hold hundreds of examples of American and European art glass and pottery. Fashion sketches, illustrations, and prints are part of the costume collections. Donations from ethnic and cultural communities include many homemade religious ornaments, paintings, and figures. The Harry T Peters "America on Stone" collection alone comprises some 1,700 color prints of scenes from the 1800s. The National Quilt Collection is art on fabric. And the tools of artists and artisans are part of the Museum's collections, too, in the form of printing plates, woodblock tools, photographic equipment, and potters' stamps, kilns, and wheels.
"Art - Overview" showing 2 items.
"La Tierra Nueva en Aztlán"
- Description
- The evolving civil rights movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s revolutionized the consciousness of young people across the United States. As in African American communities, a new sense of mobilization spread among Mexican Americans. Many adopted a more political identity—chicano and chicana—and explored their history, which was omitted from school textbooks. The Chicano movement sought to remedy the injustices experienced by many Mexican Americans, from substandard education and housing to working conditions. Many symbols and ideas of the Chicano movement were taken from the pre-Hispanic past, especially Aztec history. Aztlán, the original homeland in the Aztec migration stories, has an important place in Chicano mythology. As a symbolic reclamation of their place in American history, Chicanos locate Aztlán in the Southwest United States, in the area conquered during the Mexican-American War. The image shown here, by Manuel Moya, is an ink drawing done on a handkerchief known as a paño. Paños are graphic art works drawn on handkerchiefs by Chicano prisoners in California, Texas, and the Southwest. Titled, La Tierra Nueva en Aztlán, or The New Land in Aztlán, combines the images of the Aztec past with a Pancho Villa-like figure from the Mexican Revolution.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1986
- artist
- Moya, Manuel
- ID Number
- 1991.0431.01
- catalog number
- 1991.0431.01
- accession number
- 1991.0431
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Orale ese Vato
- Description
- As this paño humorously titled Orale ese vato (Spanish for roughly, right on, man) shows, one characteristic of Chicano art is that it avidly consumes and reconfigures both American and Mexican pop culture with its own slang, looks, and attitude. A paño is a hand-drawn handkerchief traditionally designed by Chicano prisoners. Like a letter that retells memories of both good and bad times, paños are often mailed as gifts to friends and loved ones. Valued as a vibrant popular art that overlaps with muralism, tattoo design, graffiti, and auto airbrushing, paños and their makers are receiving increased exposure for their visual storytelling abilities. An illustrator and a muralist known for depicting Chicano themes, Walter Baca (1947-1993) designed this paño in New Mexico in 1992.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1992
- artist
- Baca, Walter R.
- ID Number
- 1993.0150.02
- catalog number
- 1993.0150.02
- accession number
- 1993.0150
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center