Group Diego Rivera Mural

Our last class in Modern Art covered the work of Diego Rivera. I like to do a group project for the last class and this time we did a group mural in pastels.  First we did our standard brief introduction to the artist and looked at these three works.

From the Pan American Unity Mural at City College of San Fransisco

From the Detroit Institute of Arts mural

The Kid, image source:  Wikipedia

We segued into our project with a brief discussion of the history of students reproducing the works of great artists for practice.

For our mural, I scanned the painting Dance in Tehuantepec from Pete Hamill's book,  Diego Rivera.  I then divided it up into 6 equal parts, one for each student.  The parts were printed out full size on to an 81/2" X 11" and I trimmed the art paper down to be the same size.

They got plenty of pastels with the directions to recreate what they saw in their sample.  We talked about how to blend colors and they each got some qtips for rubbing tools.  They each did a good job and reproduced their sections really well.

Older Toad got the top left hand side.  This is his finished contribution.

Resources online for more information

National Gallery of Art's inside scoop publication
Here's the American Master's PBS series. The website includes lesson plans.

Books for more information about Diego Rivera

Materials we used

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