BOOK / "PACIFIC STREAMS." Miguel Covarrubias

Arte / Crítica / Historia

Miguel Covarrubias, "El Chamaco" (Mexico City, 1904-1957), was a caricaturist, painter, cartographer, scenographer, collector, and promoter of Mexican art and modern dance. Alongside his prolific artistic production, he made valuable contributions to anthropological, ethnological, and museographical studies. Covarrubias connected drawing and painting with public image through works characterized by subtle humor and acute political critique of modern society.

In the late thirties, "El Chamaco" was commissioned to create a series of murals in what is now the extinct Pacific House building, to accompany the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, California. Each mural in the series, titled "Pageant of the Pacific," described aspects of life in cultures around the Pacific Ocean in the form of maps: peoples, flora and fauna, economy, housing, means of transportation, and artistic expressions. Covarrubias managed to blend anthropology and caricature, creating a project that was undeniably didactic and entertaining, in a context where the world map was still changing day by day. He himself wrote a detailed description of each mural, its codes, and intentions, aiming to make explicit the reasons for using one color or another for each region, the selection of references represented in each of them, as well as his own vision of art. This text was included in a folder that reproduced the murals, a kind of atlas published by Pacific House in 1940, and which Alias Editorial now recovers in this edition, with a prologue by Abraham Cruzvillegas, which reproduces the works in large format and in color, with a design based on the original publication.

"In the collective imagination, the Pacific Ocean has been considered a vast expanse of water surrounded and sprinkled with remote, exotic villages, and as a barrier instead of what it really is: a link between the peoples, cultures, and economies of the countries in the Pacific region." -MC

Title: 15. Corrientes del Pacífico
Author: Miguel Covarrubias
Publisher: Editorial Alias
Binding: Foldable
Format: 17 x 24.5 cm
Weight: 380 gr.
Number of Pages: 148
Number of Images: 8
Genre: Art
Language: Spanish
Printing: One ink and one-quarter inks
Year: 2021, Printed in Mexico