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Tribute Piece: Art of Diego Rivera
Location: Pulido's
I-20 South Access Rd East (Front Of Building)
Listed Caption:
Diego Rivera (1886-1957)
Diego Rivera was born on December 8, 1886, in Guanajuato in Mexico, to Diego and Maria Barrientos Rivera. Being a family of rather modest means, they lived in Guanajuato until 1892, when they moved to Mexico City. At the age of ten Diego Rivera was doing well in school, and , passionately fond of drawing from an early age, started taking evening painting classes at the San Carlos Academy. In 1898 he enrolled there as a full time student, and in 1906, at the annual show, he exhibited for the first time 26 works. Thus at age twenty he was established as a painter. Diego's father was municipal councellor in Guanajuato, and was a liberal and anticlerical man. Diego's two aunts, who lived with the family, were rather religious. In 1922, he married Guadalupe Marin, whom he met while on travels in Mexico to study the various landscapes and history In the fall of 1927, Diego traveled to the Soviet Union to take part in the tenth anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution. When he returned to Mexico, his marriage to Guadalupe Marin, the mother of his two children, ended. In 1928, he went on to meet Frida Kahlo, at a weekly party. He and Kahlo married in 1929, the year he was also appointed the head of the Department of Plastic Crafts at the Ministry of Education, a position he held until 1938. In 1932 that Nelson Rockefeller asked him to paint a mural in the Radio Corporation Arts bulilding in Rockefeller Center. In 1933, he began the mural entitled "Man at the Crossroads". However, conflict arose over the mural. As a result, the mural was never completed and was chipped off the wall and destroyed in February of 1934. Rivera was determined to complete the mural but in a different location. He repainted it in Mexico City. In 1940, Diego and Frida were separated, divorced, and remarried in December of the same year. Rivera suffered a great loss in July of 1954 when his wife Frida Kahlo died. On Novemebr 24, 1957, Rivera died of heart failure in his San Angel studio. He was buried in the Rotunda of Famous Men in Civil Pantheon of Mourning. Today, he is still considered a Latin American folk hero.
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