city at night

city at night

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Popular Arts

On Wednesday I took Nancy and Fred to my favorite small museum in Mexico City, the Museum of Popular Arts.

The museum is housed in an art deco building that once served as Mexico City's central fire station.


It contains an excellent collection which showcases the diversity of Mexican handicrafts.  The items displayed here go beyond the level of simple crafts, and are truly works of art.  Nancy and Fred both enjoyed the museum.

I have written about this place before, but here are a few pictures of some of the museum's collection...


Traditional attire varies from one region of Mexico to another.



The large, cardboard Judas figures are burned in effigy on the Saturday before Easter.




An entire wall is covered with a variety of masks that are worn by dancers that perform at the fiestas throughout the country.



The elaborate "Trees of Life" clay sculptures originally depicted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but now often deal with other themes.




There are a large number of "alebrijes"... both the cardboard creatures which generally are made in the Mexico City area, and the wooden carvings from the state of Oaxaca.


One entire room is filled with skeleton figures.  They are great fun and especially appropriate at this time of year.




Everyone in this bullring... even the bull... is a skeleton.

After visiting the museum, we then walked a few blocks to the Ciudadela Handicrafts Market.  Although most of the items for sale there cannot approach the level of quality that we saw in the museum, there is some nice merchandise (along with the tourist junk).  After a couple hours of wandering from stall to stall, Nancy and Fred had completed all the souvenir shopping that they needed to do.

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