The editorial categories are research topics that have guided researchers during the recovery phase and continue to be the impetus behind the Documents Project’s digital archive and the Critical Documents book series. Developed by the project’s Editorial Board, each of the teams analyzed this framework and adapted it to their local contexts in developing their research objectives and work plans during the Recovery Phase. Learn more on the Editorial Framework page.
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In his article, Armando Castellanos interprets Raoul Deal’s work featured in the exhibition Las Esperanzas del Loro Verde [The Hopes of the Green Parrot]. Castellanos argues that Deal’s work confronts the duality, ambiguity, and tension between high art and folk art. Castellanos contends that, in using popular icons in his installations, Deal questions art itself and its function, as well as the circulation of art and other symbolic goods in society. Regarding its relationship with contemporary Mexican art, Castellanos argues that Deal’s work operates in a space where his organic realism confronts a neo-academic tradition.
The Mexican critic and curator Armando Castellanos wrote this essay on the work of Raoul Deal for the exhibition Las Esperanzas del Loro Verde at the Museo Universitario del Chopo in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1991.Deal was born in Topeka, Kansas, and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he earned a BFA in painting. He received an MFA from Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and lived for a time there, in the states of Veracruz and Tabasco, before returning to the United States to live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The title of the exhibition is inspired by a Panamanian saying, “¿Acaso porque el loro cague verde, es pintor?”[“So just because the parrot shits green, he’s a painter?”] that Deal read in a book while traveling in Argentina in 1979. (In this regard, see doc. no. 840722.)