Weaving
Diego Rivera
DIEGO RIVERA, 1936. TEMPERA AND OIL ON CANVAS.
Hunched over a loom in total focus, Rivera’s subject balances not just her practice but the story of a nation in her lap. Rivera’s portrait is not just of any weaver but of Luz Jiménez, a master weaver, historian, and as a Nahua woman, part of the largest Indigenous group in Mexico, who became a thought leader and teacher to members of the Mexican Nationalist movement like Rivera. Practicing and passing on the traditional artworks, skills, and languages that she had learnt from her mother and other family members, she became a figure of inspiration to a group of artists who saw her as the embodiment of a pre-colonial Mexico. Many subjects of Rivera and his contemporaries’s paintings came from stories told to them and ideas explained by Jiménez, so by making her the subject and protagonist of a work, he pays a debt to the education she provided.