By Danielle Cortes, Staff Writer
In honor of Hispanic heritage month, we would like to give you a small touch upon Hispanic figures and their impacts in our nations history. The first spotlight this month is a famous Mexican painter, Diego Rivera. Rivera started studying art at a young age and even moved to Europe to improve his painting abilities, and engaged in the culture for nearly fourteen years. But it was not until he began to study the Renaissance period that Rivera found his true medium. Rivera continued to respond to the people’s appeal of Mexican history.
He had a passion for making large public masterpieces with the themes of history and the future of humanity. Rivera also found ways of subtly incorporating his radical political beliefs, and even became intrigued with the struggles of the working class. It was Rivera’s art and efforts of trying inform Americans on the industrial revolution and his radical political views which caught the eye of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. President Roosevelt then used Rivera’s inspiration as a forefront in the founding of the WPA (Works Progress Administration). This federal act helped to provide the unemployed with jobs and rebuild communities across America in every aspect (parks, buildings, the arts, and media).
As is an story of success we must triumph tests and obstacles that stand in our way. While Rivera had much reprise in other parts of the world where he first started, he received much criticism in the United States when he first got here. He did, however, fare well in Detroit. In 1957 Diego Rivera passed away in Mexico City at the age of seventy. Although society lost a great influence on culture, he continues to receive notoriety for his paintings of industrial revolution, and later for the famous paintings of his wife Frida Kahlo.
