Emiliano. Zapata después de Zapata
Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, 2020Mónica Castillo’s Plato de Zapata (Zapata’s Dish), 1987, depicts the severed head of Emiliano Zapata, the worshipped agrarian leader of the Mexican Revolution, served on a platter surrounded by forks and knives. In a country where the past is idealized to such extent that it becomes fixed, its (male) protagonists turned into secular saints, the vision is, to say the least, a strident one. However, in this exhibition—whose discourse has been blunted by histrionic protesters—curator Luis Vargas Santiago successfully argues that Zapata’s popularity eclipses his untouchability: Culling over one hundred and forty works made from 1906 to today, Vargas Santiago conducts a nuanced iconographical study on the recurring appropriation, state-sponsored and otherwise, of the folk hero’s likeness.