The Pulitzer Arts Foundation explores the career of pioneering Mexican photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903 – 1993) with an exhibition of images that she considered to be her personal photography. Lola Álvarez Bravo: Picturing Mexico presents nearly 50 photographs and photomontages spanning Álvarez Bravo’s five- decade career. Together, these illuminate the ways in which her modernist aesthetic, with meticulous attention to pattern, light, and composition, contributed to her depictions of Mexico’s diverse inhabitants and landscapes as she traveled the country documenting life in the years following the Mexican Revolution (ca. 1910– 1920).
On view from September 14, 2018, through February 16, 2019, Lola Álvarez Bravo: Picturing Mexico has been curated by Pulitzer Arts Foundation Assistant Curator Stephanie Weissberg. The Pulitzer is the exhibition’s only venue.
Pulitzer Director Cara Starke says, “Our fall exhibitions, one devoted to Lola Álvarez Bravo and a simultaneous presentation of the work of Ruth Asawa, highlight women who have been underrecognized. In the case of Lola Álvarez Bravo, we see a brilliant artist and activist who was for many years eclipsed by her better-known husband, photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Yet she made extraordinary, profound photographs, assembling a body of work that played a crucial role in both the country’s cultural renaissance in the years following the Mexican Revolution and in the flourishing of modernism there.”
Weissberg adds, “Lola Álvarez Bravo: Picturing Mexico aims to represent the arc of Álvarez Bravo’s career, illuminating her considerable impact on the history of photography and—as a self- directed agent of change—on post-Revolutionary Mexico. In doing this, we hope to provide and provoke new insights into her work, including the ways in which her astutely perceptive portraits of the life and landscape of Mexico were at once documentation and modernist experimentation.”
Lola Álvarez Bravo: Picturing Mexico
September 14, 2018 – February 16, 2019
Pulitzer Arts Foundation
3716 Washington Blvd
St. Louis, MO 63108
