The Edge of Time: Photographs of Mexico by Mariana Yampolsky (Wittliff Gallery) (Signed)

University of Texas Press, 1/1/1998. Hardcover. Like New. 10x9x0. Signed. Signed underneath author/artists' photograph. Hardcover and dust jacket. Good binding and cover. Light wear. Clean, unmarked pages. <br> "One of the most prominent and influential artists of Mexico, Mariana Yampolsky grew up surrounded by intellectual thought, socialist idealism, and an interest in global humanism. In 1952 she immigrated from Chicago to Mexico and became a part of the Taller de Grafica Popular, a cooperative workshop of painters and graphic artists dedicated to social and political ideas. She exhibited her printmaking work in collective exhibitions throughout the world from 1945 to 1958. Yampolsky's social responsibility and need to communicate the visual messages of artists to the public is seen in her expansive work as a graphic arts editor for school textbooks. Later in her career, she turned to photography and documented the complexity of Mexican culture, including its landscapes, folk art, and poverty. Her father, Oscar Yampolsky, a sculptor and painter, came from a progressive, multilingual, cosmopolitan but financially uncertain Russian Jewish family that had immigrated to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century because of antisemitic persecution. Her father met the woman who would become Mariana Yampolsky's mother on a study trip to Europe after he won the Prix de Rome. Mariana's mother was from an upper middle-class German Jewish family who immigrated to Brazil in the late 1930s to escape the Nazis. Her maternal uncle was Franz Boas (1858–1942), considered to be the father of anthropology in the United States. While her first art medium in Mexico was printmaking, in 1948 she turned from engraving to photography. At San Carlos Academy, she studied with Lola Alvarez Bravo (1907–1993), Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902–2002), the second wife of the noted Mexican photographer who, like her husband, was an exceptional Mexican photographer capturing the haunting duality of daily life in the country, where the past and present exist simultaneously. Lola Alvarez Bravo's photograph, From Generation to Generation (1950), depicts a mestizo woman with her white-shirted back to the viewer carrying her daughter in her arms. The photographer's mood and purpose are reflected years later in Yampolsky's photograph Apron (1988). Manuel Alvarez Bravo uncovers a regional pictorial vocabulary in the seemingly quiet, patient timelessness of Mexican/Indian figures. In his photographs there is a poetic sense of death, an anonymity of the people in ordinary activity, and the omnipresent weight of laborious work. Mariana Yampolsky's immigration to Mexico in 1945 occurred a year before the African American sculptor, Barbara Catlett (b. 1915), moved there. A sense of personal and political exploration, artistic identity and raised social consciousness regarding gender, racial and ethical issues appear as an impetus for these women artists' full integration into the Mexican cultural vanguard." - Jewish Woman's Archive <br> This is an oversized or heavy book, which requires additional postage for international delivery outside the US.