Street Art and Muralism: Post-Revolution to Modern Culture Jamming

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the Mexican Muralist movement, New Deal public arts (WPA), contemporary activist street art, semiotics, and culture jamming.

Mestizaje

A unified cultural identity promoted post-Mexican Revolution under President Álvaro Obregón that merged Indigenous and Spanish heritages into a shared national pride.

José Vasconcelos

The Mexican Education Minister who dispatched 'Cultural Missionaries' into rural regions to teach literacy and arts while commissioning public murals to bypass illiteracy.

Los Tres Grandes

The prominent artistic triad of the Mexican muralism movement consisting of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Third Space

A public social environment entirely separate from home ('first space') and work/school ('second space') that fosters community bonding and belonging.

Buon Fresco

A classical painting technique perfected during the Italian Renaissance involving applying pigment directly onto wet plaster, mastered and adapted by Diego Rivera.

Man, Controller of the Universe

A Diego Rivera fresco in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, originally titled 'Man at the Center of the Universe' before John D. Rockefeller had the NYC original destroyed in 1934 for depicting Vladimir Lenin.

Pan American Unity

Diego Rivera's final mural in the United States, located at City College of San Francisco, featuring a central hybrid of the Aztec earth goddess Coatlicue and an industrial stamping machine.

Detroit Industry Murals

A 27-panel fresco cycle by Diego Rivera at the Detroit Institute of Arts celebrating automotive manufacturing lines while exploring the duality of technology used for healing versus warfare.

Man of Fire

José Clemente Orozco's dome fresco at the Hospicio Cabañas featuring a solitary figure ascending into flames at the apex, interpreted as Prometheus or post-revolutionary 'planetary man.'

The Iron Horse Metaphor

An Orozco mural element in the Hospicio Cabañas that merges a locomotive train and a warhorse into a single mechanical beast to symbolize the crushing destruction of conflict and technology.

The Epic of American Civilization

A $3{,}000\text{-square-foot}$ cyclical narrative mural by José Clemente Orozco housed in the Baker Library reading room at Dartmouth College.

América Tropical

An 80-foot outdoor mural painted by David Alfaro Siqueiros on Olvera Street in Los Angeles depicting an Indigenous peasant lashed to a double-cross beneath an American eagle.

Esculto-pintura (Sculpto-painting)

A mixed-medium method developed by David Alfaro Siqueiros utilizing cement, iron, asbestos, industrial automotive lacquers, and airbrushes in works like 'The March of Humanity.'

Polyangularity

A cinematic, multi-angle perspective technique pioneered by David Alfaro Siqueiros designed to engage a moving viewer rather than a static vantage point.

Hoovervilles

Depression-era shantytowns built from scrap wood, cardboard, tin, and glass in public parks and lots, named ironically after President Herbert Hoover.

Works Progress Administration (WPA)

A New Deal agency established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that funded roughly $\$5\text{ billion}$ into the economy, providing employment to about $8.5\text{ million}$ Americans.

Guardians of Traffic

Four pairs of $43\text{-foot}$ Art Deco sandstone figures sculpted by Henry Hering on Cleveland's Hope Memorial Bridge symbolizing the evolution of transportation.

Federal Project Number One (FPA)

A WPA umbrella initiative directed by Harry Hopkins employing approximately $40{,}000$ cultural workers across art, writing, theater, and music.

Harlem Artists Guild

An advocacy group founded in 1935 by Charles Alston to challenge federal discrimination and secure equitable WPA employment opportunities for Black artists.

Silhouette Mosaic Technique

A durable medium developed by Winold Reiss using nickel-sized colored glass tiles against tinted plaster backgrounds to withstand smoke and soot in industrial spaces.

"Porkopolis"

A 19th-century nickname given to Cincinnati for being the world's largest pork-packing center, yielding the excess animal fats that birthed Procter & Gamble.

Rookwood Pottery

The first large American manufacturing enterprise founded and run by a woman (Maria Longworth Storer in 1880), known for pioneering the 1904 translucent matte 'Vellum' glaze.

Chip Thomas

A physician and artist who installs large-scale black-and-white photographic wheat paste murals on the Navajo Nation, blending allopathic clinical care with communal artistic healing.

Cement Eclipses

Temporary urban mini-sculptures under $2\text{ feet}$ tall created by Isaac Cordal featuring grey-faced clay men in business suits placed in puddles, gutters, and sinking canoes.

Bordalo II

An environmental street artist who constructs 2D and 3D animal portraits out of car bumpers, tires, and industrial debris to illustrate 'objective violence' against wildlife.

Stop Telling Women To Smile

A public street art campaign by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh addressing the everyday continuum of street harassment, objectification, and spatial policing women experience.

Amazone Project

A wheat paste mural project by YZ (Yseult Digan) celebrating the 19th-century military women of Dahomey who fought French forces during the First Franco-Dahomean War (1890).

Calligraffiti

A hybrid visual style pioneered by French-Tunisian artist El Seed blending traditional Arabic script with modern graffiti aesthetics.

Magic Realism (in Street Art)

An aesthetic framework blending supernatural imagery with ordinary reality to capture postcolonial trauma and honor Indigenous ontologies where physical and spiritual worlds are linked.

"Radical Positivity"

The artistic method of Colombian artist Ladania, utilizing vivid colors and genderless/raceless mythic figures to reclaim trauma-marked urban concrete as emotional sanctuaries.

Farid Rueda

A Mexican street artist known for rendering Mesoamerican totemic wildlife in prismatic, geometric designs across colonial nations to combat Indigenous erasure.

Posthumanism

A philosophical approach in street art that rejects human exceptionalism and focuses on multi-species coexistence, interdependency, and environmental endurance.

Culture Jamming

An activist and artistic strategy that disrupts commercial mass media and corporate advertising by repurposing corporate design formulas to critique consumerism.

Subvertising

The guerrilla tactic of physically altering or parodying commercial transit posters, billboards, and corporate advertisements to reveal brand hypocrisy.

Sousveillance

The inverse of institutional surveillance; a 'bottom-up' monitoring practice where citizens observe, document, and challenge powerful authority structures and tech monopolies.

Parrhesia

The act of speaking bold, dangerous, and unfiltered truth to institutional power at substantial social, legal, or personal risk.

Signifier

The physical form, symbol, or sensory image of a sign (such as a specific logo or slogan) that semioticians alter to capture viewer attention.

Signified

The mental concept, underlying idea, or psychological association triggered in the mind of the viewer by a signifier.

Denotation

The literal, explicit, baseline definition or visual identification of an unaltered sign (e.g., the standard Nike Swoosh).

Connotation

The cultural, emotional, and social values constructed around a commercial logo (such as prestige or happiness) that culture jammers expose as corporate manipulation.

Laughtivism

A culture-jamming tactic that leverages pranks, irony, corporate spoofs, and humor rather than aggressive lecturing to deliver political critiques.

Vermibus

A transgressive street artist known for removing public fashion ads and applying solvent to dissolve cosmetic figures into skeletal, zombie-like critiques of beauty standards.