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Beyond the Grave: The Twentieth-Century Afterlife of West Mexican Burial Effigies

2000; College Art Association; Volume: 82; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3051420

1559-6478

Judy Sund,

Photography and Visual Culture

From the mid-1960s until 1995, West Mexican burial effigies were developed as brand mascots for Kahlua, a Mexican-made liqueur. These effigies had otherwise remained relatively unknown to Euro-American audiences throughout the twentieth century, mainly because their makers' personal and cultural anonymity and the effigies' lowly medium, formal quirks, and locus of production marked them as primitive and peripheral. This chronicle demonstrates the particular malleability of objects deemed primitive by those who collect and display them and suggests that the shifting tone and emphases of Kahlua's print ads reflect changing attitudes toward Mexico and the primitive in the United States.