Here is a magnificent presentation of the Mexican artisans and their creations displayed in 484 beautiful color photographs. The chapters present the master designers and silversmiths whose reputations have grown to international fame with an intimate look at one of the principal designers, H-ctor Aguilar, and the personnel at this workshop. Valentin Vidaurreta, Los Castillo, William Spratling, Antonio Pineda, Hubert Harmon, Enrique Ledesma, and many more craftsmen are represented by their exquisite designs.

Margot Van Voorhies was an American in the mid-twentieth century who went to Taxco, Mexico, and established a jewelry design business best known for exquisite enamel work. This fascinating book relates the pains of her childhood and eventual refuge in Mexico, where she developed an artistic talent into the Margot de Taxco workshop, that employed hundreds of artisans, particularly including women. Her associations with Taxco silversmiths, who were taught by innovator William Spratling, became the springboard for her own development and success. Margot's designs are distinctive, often based on spiral motifs inspired by vines and floral imagery. Glorious colored enamels in brilliant hues and original designs distinguish her work. Today, Margot Van Voorhies is considered one of the most productive silver artists in Taxco of the mid-20th century. Her legacy is featured here also, in the work of four contemporary artists who strive to create equally superior modern silver jewelry in Taxco.

Sculptors, painters, and architects in 20th-century Mexico, working in silver, inspired unprecedented stylistic and technical experimentation. This dual-language English/Spanish compendium focuses primarily on threads of influence in the development of the modern Mexican silver industry. It covers the active artistic communities in Taxco and Mexico City, which had a major impact on silver designers, maestros, and silversmiths. Morrill helps us explore the materials, techniques, and design aesthetics of artists William Spratling, Hector Aguilar, Margot Van Voorhies, Anna Morelli, and Matilde Poulat, together with a group of talented contemporary Mexican artists designing in silver. The artists' works were born out of a unique perspective, the challenge provided by the aesthetics of Mexican indigenous art. Forces like cubism, surrealism, primitivism, and abstraction were incorporated into a distinctly Mexican stylistic language. Researchers, curators, collectors, and art lovers will treasure this indispensible resource, demonstrating why Mexico has been and continues to be an exciting and nurturing setting for artists in silver.

The Casa del Dean in Puebla, Mexico, is one of few surviving sixteenth-century residences in the Americas. Built in 1580 by Tomas de la Plaza, the Dean of the Cathedral, the house was decorated with at least three magnificent murals, two of which survive. Their rediscovery in the 1950s and restoration in 2010 revealed works of art that rival European masterpieces of the early Renaissance, while incorporating indigenous elements that identify them with Amerindian visual traditions.

Extensively illustrated with new color photographs of the murals, The Casa del Dean presents a thorough iconographic analysis of the paintings and an enlightening discussion of the relationship between Tomas de la Plaza and the indigenous artists whom he commissioned. Penny Morrill skillfully traces how native painters, trained by the Franciscans, used images from Classical mythology found in Flemish and Italian prints and illustrated books from France--as well as animal images and glyphic traditions with pre-Columbian origins--to create murals that are reflective of Don Tomas's erudition and his role in evangelizing among the Amerindians. She demonstrates how the importance given to rhetoric by both the Spaniards and the Nahuas became a bridge of communication between these two distinct and highly evolved cultures. This pioneering study of the Casa del Dean mural cycle adds an important new chapter to the study of colonial Latin American art, as it increases our understanding of the process by which imagery in the New World took on Christian meaning.