Mary K Coffey

Biography

Mary Coffey specializes in the history of modern Mexican visual culture, with an emphasis on Mexican muralism and the politics of exhibition. She also publishes in the fields of American art, Latin American cultural studies, and museum studies. She has published essays on a broad range of visual culture, from Mexican folk art to motorcycles to eugenics exhibitions. Mary Coffey studied Art History and Cultural Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before joining the faculty at Dartmouth she taught at Pomona College (1999-2001) and was a Faculty Fellow and Internship Coordinator at New York University's Graduate Program in Museum Studies (2001-2004). Mary Coffey's book How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State was published by Duke University Press in 2012. This book offers the first study of the reciprocal relationship between Mexican muralism and Mexican museum practice. Through case studies of the nation’s three most significant public museums, all of which include major works of mural art—the Palace of Fine Arts, the National History Museum, and the National Anthropology Museum—it traces the transformation of Mexican muralism from a public art with radical social intentions into a form of state propaganda. The book reveals that artists often willingly and at other times inadvertently participated in the official construction of national art, history, and ethnic origins proclaimed within these museums. Simultaneously, it shows how the museum brought mural art to the popular audiences its artists hoped to reach, albeit in ways they did not anticipate. How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture received the Charles Rufus Morey Prize from the College Art Association for a distinguished book published in Art History in 2012.

Research Interest

U.S. and Latin American art and culture, Mexican muralism, the history of museums, the politics of exhibition, cultural policy and citizenship, public art controversies, Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Rufino Tamayo, Mexican Folk Art.