Mural by Diego Rivera

Mural by Diego Rivera, originalmente cargada por Eric Austria.

This is actually a detail of a mural inside the Coit Tower in San Francisco. It was painted by the famous Mexican painter, Diego Rivera in the 1930's. He's wife, is the famous Frida Kahlo, also a painter. She was portrayed later by Salma Hayek in her bioepic. The 360 degree mural surrounds the first floor of the tower. It' so beautiful and the details just impeccable. I really don't like photographing paintings but this particular one just stood out. I like the way all the races seems to be represented in this section. i have to do more research about this mural.

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Diego Rivera (December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957) was born Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez in Guanajuato, Gto. He was a world-famous Mexican painter, an active Communist, and husband of Frida Kahlo, 1929-1939 and 1940-1954 (her death). Rivera's large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Renaissance. Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted murals in Mexico City, Chapingo, Cuernavaca, San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City. His 1931 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City was their second.

Diego Rivera was born in Guanajuato City, Guanajuato, to a well-off family. Rivera was descended, on his mother's side, from Jews who converted to Roman Catholicism, and, on his father's side, from Spanish nobility. Since he was ten years of age, Rivera studied art at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City. He was sponsored to continue study in Europe by Teodoro A. Dehesa Méndez, the governor of the State of Veracruz.

After arrival in Europe in 1907, Rivera initially went to study with Eduardo Chicharro in Madrid, Spain, and from there went to Paris, France, to live and work with the great gathering of artists in Montparnasse, especially at La Ruche, where his friend Amedeo Modigliani painted his portrait in 1914. His circle of close friends, which included Ilya Ehrenburg, Chaim Soutine, Modigliani's wife Jeanne Hébuterne, Max Jacob, gallery owner Leopold Zborowski, and Moise Kisling, was captured for posterity by Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska (Marevna) in her painting "Homage to Friends from Montparnasse" (1962).

In those years, Paris was witnessing the beginning of cubism in paintings by such eminent painters as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. From 1913 to 1917, Rivera enthusiastically embraced this new school of art. Around 1917, inspired by Paul Cézanne's paintings, Rivera shifted toward Post-Impressionism with simple forms and large patches of vivid colors. His paintings began to attract attention, and he was able to display them at several exhibitions.

In 1920, urged by Alberto J. Pani, the Mexican ambassador to France, Rivera left France and traveled through Italy studying its art, includingRenaissance frescoes. After Jose Vasconcelos became Minister of Education, Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921 to become involved in the government sponsored Mexican mural program planned by Vasconcelos. (See also Mexican Muralism)The program included such Mexicanartists as José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo, and the French artistJean Charlot. In January 1922, he painted - experimentally in encaustic - his first significant muralCreation in the Bolívar Auditorium of the National Preparatory School in Mexico City guarding himself with a pistol against right-wing students.

In the autumn of 1922, Rivera participated in the founding of the Revolutionary Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors, and later that year he joined the Mexican Communist Party (including its Central Committee). His murals, subsequently painted in fresco only, dealt with Mexican society and reflected the country's 1910 Revolution. Rivera developed his own native style based on large, simplified figures and bold colors with an Aztec influence clearly present in murals at theSecretariat of Public Education in Mexico City begun in September 1922, intended to consist of one hundred and twenty-four frescoes, and finished in 1928.

His art, in a fashion similar to the steles of the Maya, tells stories. The mural “En el Arsenal” (In the Arsenal) shows on the right hand side Tina Modotti holding an ammunition belt and facing Julio Antonio Mella, in a light hat, and Vittorio Vidale behind in a black hat. Rivera's radical political beliefs, his attacks on the church and clergy, as well as his dealings with Trotskyists and left-wing assassins made him a controversial figure even in communist circles. Leon Trotsky even lived with Rivera and Kahlo for several months while exiled in Mexico. Some of Rivera's most famous murals are featured at the National School of Agriculture at Chapingo near Texcoco (1925–27), in the Cortés Palace in Cuernavaca (1929-30), and the National Palace in Mexico City (1929–30, 1935).

In the autumn of 1927, Rivera arrived in Moscow, accepting an invitation to take part in the celebration of the 10th anniversary of theOctober Revolution. Subsequently, he was to paint a mural for the Red Army Club in Moscow, but in 1928 he was ordered out by the authorities because of involvement in anti-Soviet politics, and he returned to Mexico. In 1929, Rivera was expelled from the Mexican Communist Party. His 1928 mural In the Arsenal was interpreted by some as evidence of Rivera's prior knowledge of the murder ofJulio Antonio Mella allegedly by Stalinist assassin Vittorio Vidale. After divorcing Guadalupe (Lupe) Marin, Rivera married Frida Kahloin August 1929. Also in 1929, the first English-language book on Rivera, American journalist Ernestine Evans's The Frescoes of Diego Rivera, was published in New York. In December, Rivera accepted a commission to paint murals in the Palace of Cortez in Cuernavacafrom the American Ambassador to Mexico.

In September 1930, Rivera accepted an invitation from architect Timothy L. Pflueger to paint for him in San Francisco, California. After arriving in November accompanied by Kahlo, Rivera painted a mural for the City Club of the San Francisco Stock Exchange for US$2,500 and a fresco for the California School of Fine Art, which is now in the San Francisco Art Institute. Kahlo and Rivera worked and lived at the studio of Ralph Stackpole, who had suggested Rivera to Pflueger. Rivera met Helen Wills Moody, a famous tennis player, who modeled for his City Club mural. In November 1931, Rivera had a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Kahlo was present at the opening of the New York MoMA show. Between 1932 and 1933, he completed a famous series of twenty-seven fresco panels entitled Detroit Industry on the walls of an inner court at the Detroit Institute of Arts. During the McCarthyism of the 1950s, a large sign was placed in the courtyard defending the artistic merit of the murals while attacking his politics as "detestable."

His mural Man at the Crossroads, begun in 1933 for the Rockefeller Center in New York City, was removed after a furor erupted in the press over a portrait of Vladimir Lenin it contained. As a result of the negative publicity, a further commission was cancelled to paint a mural for an exhibition at the Chicago World's Fair. In December 1933, Rivera returned to Mexico, and he repainted Man at the Crossroads in 1934 in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. This surviving version was called Man, Controller of the Universe. On June 5, 1940, invited again by Pflueger, Rivera returned for the last time to the United States to paint a ten-panel mural for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. Pan American Unity was completed November 29, 1940. As he was painting, Rivera was on display in front of Exposition attendees. He received US$1,000 per month and US$1,000 for travel expenses. The mural includes representations of two of Pflueger's architectural works as well as portraits of Kahlo, woodcarver Dudley C. Carter, and actress Paulette Goddard, who is depicted holding Rivera's hand as they plant a white tree together. Rivera's assistants on the mural included the pioneer African-American artist, dancer, and textile designer Thelma Johnson Streat. The mural and its archives reside at City College of San Francisco.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Rivera

Mural by Diego Rivera

Frida Angel

Frida Angel, originalmente cargada por audreyeclectic.

Mixed media collage painting. Up close detail.

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Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954) born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was an internationally popular Mexicanpainter.She painted using vibrant colors in a style that was influenced by indigenous cultures of Mexico and European influences includingRealism, Symbolism, and Surrealism. Many of her works are self-portraits that symbolically express her own pain and sexuality. Kahlo was married to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.

Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in the house of her parents, known as La Casa Azul (The Blue House), in Coyoacán. At the time, this was a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City.

Her father, Guillermo Kahlo (1872-1941), was born Carl Wilhelm Kahlo in Pforzheim, Germany. He was the son of the painter and goldsmithJakob Heinrich Kahlo and Henriette Kaufmann. Kahlo's father was of Jewish and Hungarian ancestry.Wilhelm Kahlo sailed to Mexico in 1891 at the age of nineteen and, upon his arrival, changed his German forename, Wilhelm, to its Spanish equivalent, 'Guillermo'.

Frida's mother, Matilde Calderón y Gonzalez, was a devout Catholic of primarily indigenous, as well as Spanish descent. Frida's parents were married shortly after the death of Guillermo's first wife during the birth of her second child. Although their marriage was quite unhappy, Guillermo and Matilde had four daughters, with Frida being the third. She had two older half sisters. Frida once remarked that she grew up in a world surrounded by females. Throughout most of her life, however, Frida remained close to her father.

The Mexican Revolution began in 1910 when Kahlo was three. Later Kahlo claimed that she was born in 1910 so people would directly associate her with the revolution. In her writings, she recalled that her mother would usher her and her sisters inside the house as gunfire echoed in the streets of her hometown, which was poor at the time. Occasionally, men would leap over the walls into their backyard and sometimes her mother would prepare a meal for the hungry revolutionaries.

Kahlo contracted polio at six, which left her right leg thinner than the left, which Kahlo disguised by wearing long, colorful skirts. It has been conjectured that she also suffered from spina bifida, a congenital disease that could have affected both spinal and leg development.^[5] As a girl, she participated in boxing and other sports. In 1922, Kahlo was enrolled in the Preparatoria, one of Mexico's premier schools, where she was one of only thirty-five girls. Kahlo joined a clique at the school and fell in love with the leader, Alejandro Gomez Arias. During this period, Kahlo also witnessed violent armed struggles in the streets of Mexico City as the Mexican Revolution continued.

On September 17, 1925, Kahlo was riding in a bus when the vehicle collided with a trolley car. She suffered serious injuries in the accident, including a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot, and a dislocated shoulder. An iron handrail pierced her abdomen and her uterus, which seriously damaged her reproductive ability.

Although she recovered from her injuries and eventually regained her ability to walk, she was plagued by relapses of extreme pain for the remainder of her life. The pain was intense and often left her confined to a hospital or bedridden for months at a time. She underwent as many as thirty-five operations as a result of the accident, mainly on her back, her right leg and her right foot.

Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in the house of her parents, known as La Casa Azul (The Blue House), in Coyoacán. At the time, this was a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City.

Her father, Guillermo Kahlo (1872-1941), was born Carl Wilhelm Kahlo in Pforzheim, Germany. He was the son of the painter and goldsmithJakob Heinrich Kahlo and Henriette Kaufmann. Kahlo's father was of Jewish and Hungarian ancestry. Wilhelm Kahlo sailed to Mexico in 1891 at the age of nineteen and, upon his arrival, changed his German forename, Wilhelm, to its Spanish equivalent, 'Guillermo'.

Frida's mother, Matilde Calderón y Gonzalez, was a devout Catholic of primarily indigenous, as well as Spanish descent. Frida's parents were married shortly after the death of Guillermo's first wife during the birth of her second child. Although their marriage was quite unhappy, Guillermo and Matilde had four daughters, with Frida being the third. She had two older half sisters. Frida once remarked that she grew up in a world surrounded by females. Throughout most of her life, however, Frida remained close to her father.

The Mexican Revolution began in 1910 when Kahlo was three. Later Kahlo claimed that she was born in 1910 so people would directly associate her with the revolution. In her writings, she recalled that her mother would usher her and her sisters inside the house as gunfire echoed in the streets of her hometown, which was poor at the time. Occasionally, men would leap over the walls into their backyard and sometimes her mother would prepare a meal for the hungry revolutionaries.

Kahlo contracted polio at six, which left her right leg thinner than the left, which Kahlo disguised by wearing long, colorful skirts. It has been conjectured that she also suffered from spina bifida, a congenital disease that could have affected both spinal and leg development. As a girl, she participated in boxing and other sports. In 1922, Kahlo was enrolled in the Preparatoria, one of Mexico's premier schools, where she was one of only thirty-five girls. Kahlo joined a clique at the school and fell in love with the leader, Alejandro Gomez Arias. During this period, Kahlo also witnessed violent armed struggles in the streets of Mexico City as the Mexican Revolution continued.

On September 17, 1925, Kahlo was riding in a bus when the vehicle collided with a trolley car. She suffered serious injuries in the accident, including a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot, and a dislocated shoulder. An iron handrail pierced her abdomen and her uterus, which seriously damaged her reproductive ability.

Although she recovered from her injuries and eventually regained her ability to walk, she was plagued by relapses of extreme pain for the remainder of her life. The pain was intense and often left her confined to a hospital or bedridden for months at a time. She underwent as many as thirty-five operations as a result of the accident, mainly on her back, her right leg and her right foot.

As a young artist, Kahlo approached the Mexican painter, Diego Rivera, whose work she admired, asking him for advice about pursuing art as a career. He recognized her talent and her unique expression as truly special and uniquely Mexican.^{[citation needed]} He encouraged her artistic development and began an intimate relationship with Frida. They were married in 1929, despite the disapproval of Frida's mother.

Their marriage was often tumultuous. Kahlo and Rivera had fiery temperaments and had numerous extramarital affairs. The openly bisexualKahlo had affairs with both men and women; Rivera knew of and tolerated her relationships with women, but her relationships with men made him jealous. For her part, Kahlo was furious when she learned that Rivera had an affair with her younger sister, Cristina. The couple eventually divorced, but remarried in 1940. Their second marriage was as turbulent as the first. Their living quarters often were separate, although sometimes adjacent.

Active communist sympathizers, Kahlo and Rivera befriended Leon Trotsky as he sought political sanctuary from Joseph Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union. Initially, Trotsky lived with Rivera and then at Kahlo's home,Trotsky and his wife then moved to another house in Coyoacán where, later, he was assassinated.

A few days before Frida Kahlo died on July 13, 1954, she wrote in her diary: "I hope the exit is joyful - and I hope never to return - Frida". The official cause of death was given as a pulmonary embolism, although some suspected that she died from an overdose that may or may not have been accidental. An autopsy was never performed. She had been very ill throughout the previous year and her right leg had been amputated at the knee, owing to gangrene. She had a bout of bronchopneumonia near that time, which had left her quite frail.

Later, in his autobiography, Diego Rivera wrote that the day Kahlo died was the most tragic day of his life, adding that, too late, he had realized that the most wonderful part of his life had been his love for her.

A pre-Columbian urn holding her ashes is on display in her former home, La Casa Azul (The Blue House), in Coyoacán. Today it is a museum housing a number of her works of art and numerous relics from her personal life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo

Frida Angel

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo, originalmente cargada por jeloid.

I have a profound love for Frida Kahlo and her deeply personal art.

Kahlo's work was not widely recognized until decades after her death. Often she was popularly remembered only as Diego Rivera's wife. It was not until the early 1980s, when the artistic movement in Mexico known as Neomexicanismo began, that she became very prominent. This movement recognized the values of contemporary Mexican culture; it was the moment when artists such as Kahlo, Abraham Angel, Angel Zárraga, and others became household names and Helguera's classical calendar paintings achieved fame. During the same decade other factors helped to establish her success. The movie Frida, naturaleza viva (1983), directed by Paul Leduc with Ofelia Medina as Frida and painter Juan José Gurrola as Diego, was a huge success. For the rest of her life, Medina has remained in a sort of perpetual Frida role. Also during the same time Hayden Herrera published a determinant and influential biography: Frida: The Biography of Frida Kahlo, which became a worldwide bestseller.

Raquel Tibol, a Mexican artist and personal friend of Frida, wrote Frida Kahlo: una vida abierta. Other works about her include a biography by Mexican art critic and psychoanalist Teresa del Conde and texts by other Mexican critics and theorists such as Jorge Alberto Manrique.

On June 21, 2001, she became the first Hispanic woman to be honored with a U.S. postage stamp.

In 2002 the American biographical film, Frida, directed by Julie Taymor, in which Salma Hayek portrayed the artist, was released. It grossed US$58 million worldwide.

In 2006, Kahlo's 1943 painting Roots set a US$5.6 million auction record for a Latin American work

Frida Kahlo was photographed by many artists including Carl Van Vechten, Edward Weston, Héctor García, Imogen Cunningham, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Tina Modotti, and Lucienne Bloch. Many Chicana/o artists have included versions of her self portraits in their work, among them Rupert García, Alfredo Arreguín, Yreina D. Cervántez, Marcos Raya,Gilbert Hernández, and Carmen Lomas Garza.

The 100th anniversary of the birth of Frida Kahlo honored her with the largest exhibit ever held of her paintings at the Museum of the Fine Arts Palace, Kahlo's first comprehensive exhibit in Mexico. Works were on loan from Detroit, Minneapolis, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Nagoya, Japan. The exhibit included one-third of her artistic production, as well as manuscripts and letters that had not been displayed previously. The exhibit was open June 13 through August 12, 2007 and broke all attendance records at the museum. Some of her work was on exhibit in Monterrey, Nuevo León, and moved in September 2007 to museums in the United States.

In 2008, a Frida Kahlo exhibition in the United States with over forty of her self-portraits, still lives, and portraits was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other venues.

Previously, the most recent international exhibition of Kahlo's work had been in 2005 in London, which brought together eighty-seven of her works.

Kahlo's Casa Azul (Blue House) in Coyoacán, Mexico City, where she lived and worked, was donated by Diego Rivera upon his death in 1957 and is now a museum housing artifacts of her life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo, originalmente cargada por tartx.

Vintage antique gold optical lens with a collage of Frida Kahlo self portraits with her quote "I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality." For more zee blog: www.tartx.com/blog

Frida Kahlo

BANKSY - LOVE

Bansky, originalmente cargada por LOV-E.

Visto en Manhattan

BANKSY - LOVE

BANKSY IN LA

Bansky in LA, originalmente cargada por jimstansel.

This piece was right up the street from where I was staying in LA.

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When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle.Then I realised God doesn’t work that way, so I stoleone and prayed for forgiveness.

- Emo Philips

http://www.banksy.co.uk/

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Banksy (born 1974 in Bristol) is a well-known pseudo-anonymous English street artist. He is believed to be a native of Yate, Gloucestershire, near Bristol and to have been born in 1974, but there is substantial public uncertainty about his identity and personal and biographical details. According to Tristan Manco, Banksy "was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England. The son of a photocopier engineer, he trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s." His artworks are often satirical pieces of art on topics such as politics, culture, and ethics. His street art, which combines graffiti writing with a distinctive stencilling technique, is similar to Blek le Rat, who began to work with stencils in 1981 in Paris and members of the anarcho-punk band Crass who maintained a graffiti stencil campaign on the London Tube System in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His art has appeared in cities around the world. Banksy's work was born out of the Bristol underground scene which involved collaborations between artists and musicians.
Banksy does not sell photos of street graffiti or mount exhibitions of screenprints in commercial galleries. Art auctioneers have been known to attempt to sell his street art on location and leave the problem of its removal in the hands of the winning bidder.
Banksy's "The Flower Chucker" is included in the feature film The Age of Stupid to represent all modern art stored in an archive after the end of the world as we know it.

Banksy started as a freehand graffiti artist 1992-1994 as one of Bristol's DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ), writers Kato and Tes. He was inspired by local artists and his work was part of the larger Bristol underground scene. From the start he used stencils as elements of his freehand pieces, too. By 2000 he had turned to the art of stencilling after realising how much less time it took to complete a "piece." He claims he changed to stencilling whilst he was hiding from the police under a train carriage, when he noticed the stencilled serial number and employing this technique soon became more widely noticed for his art around Bristol and London.

Asked about his technique, Banksy said:

"I use whatever it takes. Sometimes that just means drawing a moustache on a girl's face on some billboard, sometimes that means sweating for days over an intricate drawing. Efficiency is the key.”

Stencils are traditionally hand drawn or printed onto sheets of acetate or card, before being cut out by hand. Because of the secretive nature of Banksy's work and identity, it is uncertain what techniques he uses to generate the images in his stencils, though it is assumed he uses computers for some images due to the photocopy nature of much of his work.

He mentions in his book, 'Wall and Piece', that as he was starting to do graffiti that he was always too slow and was either caught or could never finish the art in the one sitting. So he devised a series of intricate stencils to minimise time and overlapping of the colour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy

BANKSY IN LA

BANKSY RAT

bansky rat, originalmente cargada por pugwash.

Banksy in Brighton.

BANKSY RAT

YELLOW ENERGY

Yellow Energy, originalmente cargada por Escoleia.

Yellow Energy

Like the energy of a bright sunny day, yellow brings clarity and awareness. The shade of yellow determines its effect: Yellow-green can mean deceit, and creates a disoriented feeling. Orange-yellow imparts a sense of establishment. Clean light yellow clears the mind, making it active and alert.

crystal-cure.com/yellow.html

YELLOW ENERGY

WIRE FRAME FLOWER OF LIVE - JAZZ9OMETEOTL - SECOND LIFE

Picture by sanchezdot.
Edited by smile.

WIRE FRAME FLOWER OF LIVE - JAZZ9OMETEOTL - SECOND LIFE

KABAH

Kabah, originalmente cargada por Mario De Leo.

The Mayan city of Kabah, with exquisite detail in the façade. The masks are representations of the god of water: Chac.

Chaac (also spelled Chac or, in Classic Mayan, Chaahk) is the name of the Maya rain deity. With his lightning axe, Chaac strikes the clouds and produces thunder and rain.

Like other Maya gods, Chaac is both one and manifold. Four Chaacs are based in the cardinal directions and wear the directional colors. Contemporary Yucatec Maya farmers distinguish many more aspects of the rain and the clouds and personify them as different, hierarchically-ordered rain deities. The Chorti Maya have preserved important folklore regarding the process of rain-making, which involved rain deities striking rain-carrying snakes with their axes.

Earthenware effigy urn (an incense burner) of Chaac, 12th-14th century

The rain deities had their human counterparts. In the traditional Mayan (and Mesoamerican) community, one of the most important functions was that of rain-maker, which presupposed an intimate acquaintance with (and thus, initiation by) the rain deities, and a knowledge of their places and movements.

Particularly the Huastec Maya (Teenek), have a cyclical concept of water. Virile, young lightning deities dominating the skies during the rainy season are transformed into wasted, terrestrial and subterranean old men (Mamlab 'Grandfather') during the dry season; in the ocean, the old men rejuvenate themselves again. This cyclical concept may well have been shared by the Classic Period Maya.

Among the rituals for the rain deities, the Yucatec Cha-Chaac ceremony for asking for rain was a ceremonial banquet for the rain deities; it included four boys acting as frogs. Asking for rain and crops was also the purpose of 16th-century rituals at the karstic wells, or cenotes, of Yucatan. Young men and women were lowered into these wells and left to drown there, so as to make them enter the realm (and possibly, become the escorts) of the rain deities. Alternatively, they were thrown into the wells later to be drawn up again, and give oracles.

Chaac is usually depicted with a human body showing reptilian or amphibian scales, and with a non-human head evincing fangs and a long, pendulous nose. In the Classic style, a shell serves as his ear ornament. He often carries shield and lightning-axe, the axe being personified by a closely related deity, god K, called Bolon Dzacab in Yucatec.

A large part of the most important Maya book, the Dresden Codex, is dedicated to the Chaacs, their locations, and activities. It illustrates the intimate relationship existing between the Chaacs, the Bacabs, and the aged goddess, Ixchel. The main source on the 16th-century Yucatec Maya, Bishop de Landa, combines the four Chaacs with the four Bacabs and Pauahtuns into one concept. The Bacabs were aged deities governing the subterranean sphere and its water supplies, corresponding to the Huaxtec Mamlab mentioned above.

In the Classic period, the king often impersonated the rain deity (or the associated rain serpent) while the pictogram of the rain deity can accompany the king's other names. This may be related to the king's role as a war chief, metaphorically equated with the violence of a thunderstorm. It may also, however, have given expression to his role as a supreme rain-maker.

About Chaac's role in Classic period mythological narrative, little is known. However, he is present at the resurrection of the Maya maize god from the carapace of a turtle representing the earth. Together with the skeletal Death God, he also seems to preside over an initiate's ritual transformation into a jaguar.

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Kabah (also spelled Kabaah, Kabáh, Kahbah and Kaba) is a Maya archaeological site in the south-east of the Mexican state of Yucatán.

Kabah is to the south of Uxmal, and is connected to that city by a grand 18 km long raised pedestrian causeway 5 meters wide with monumental arches at each end. Kabah is the second largest ruin of the Puuc region after Uxmal.

The name "Kabah" or "Kabaah" is usually taken to be archaic Maya language for "strong hand". This is a pre-Columbian name for the site, mentioned in Maya chronicles. An alternative name is Kabahaucan or "royal snake in the hand".

The area was inhabited by the mid 3rd century BC. Most of the architecture now visible was built between the 7th century and the 11th century. A sculpted date on a doorjamb of one of the buildings gives the date 879, probably around the city's height. Another inscribed date is one of the latest carved in the Maya Classic style, in 987. Kabaah was abandoned or at least no new ceremonial architecture built for several centuries before the Spanish conquest of Yucatán.

The most famous structure at Kabah is the "Palace of the Masks", the façade decorated with hundreds of stone masks of the long-nosed rain god Chaac; it is also known as the Codz Poop, meaning "Rolled Matting", from the pattern of the stone mosaics. This massive repetition of a single set of elements is unusual in Maya art, and here is used to unique effect.

Masks of the rain god abound on other structures throughout the site. Copal incense has been discovered in some of the stone noses of the raingods. The emphasis placed on Chaac, the "Protector of the Harvest", both here and at other neighboring Puuc sites, stemmed from the scarcity of water in the region. There are no cenotes in this dryer, northern part of the Yucatan, so the Maya here had to depend solely on rain.

Portion of "Temple of the Masks" facade as drawn by Frederick Catherwood.

The site also has a number of other palaces, low stone buildings, and step-pyramid temples. While most is in the Puuc Maya style, some show Chenes elements. The site had a number of sculpted panels, lintels, and doorjambs, most of which have been removed to museums elsewhere. The sculptures mostly depict the site's rulers and scenes of warfare.

The first detailed account of the ruin was published by John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in 1843.

Codz Poop - Temple of the Masks.

The site is on Mexican highway 261, some 140 km south from Mérida, Yucatán, towards Campeche, Campeche, and is a popular tourism destination. Ruins extend for a considerable distance on both sides of the highway; many of the more distant structures are little visited, and some are still overgrown with forest. As of 2003^[update], a program is ongoing to clear and restore more buildings, as well as archeological excavations under the direction of archeologist Ramón Carrasco. Kabah was declared a Yucatán state park in 1993.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabah_(Maya_site)

KABAH

PALACIO DE BELLAS ARTES

Palacio Bellas Artes, originalmente cargada por Mario De Leo.

A very recurred landscape scene in Mexico: the Palace of Fine Arts (Palacio de Bellas Artes).

This was taken from the Sears department store right in front during a clear weekend.

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Palacio de Bellas Artes (Spanish for Palace of Fine Arts) is the premier opera house of Mexico City. The building well known for both its extravagant Beaux Arts exterior in imported Italian Carrara white marble and its murals by Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco.

The Palacio has two museums: the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes and the Museo de la Arquitectura. Metro Bellas Artes is located alongside.

The theatre is used for classical music, opera and dance, notably the "Baile Folklórico". A distinctive feature of the theatre is its stained glass Tifany's curtain depicting a volcano and the valley of Mexico. It is the home of Mexico's National Symphony Orchestra, the Bellas Artes Orchestra, the Bellas Artes Chamber Orchestra, the National Dance Company, and the Bellas Artes Opera.

View of the Palacio de Bellas Artes from the Torre Latinoamericana.

Maria Callas sang in several productions at the Palacio early in her career, and recordings exist of several of her performances here. Other opera greats who have performed and/or sang there include Plácido Domingo, Pavarotti, Kathleen Battle, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Jessye Norman. Most of the world's great orchestras and dance companies have also performed there, including the New York, Vienna, Israel, Moscow, London and Royal Philharmonics; The National Arts Centre Orchestra (Canada); the Philadelphia, Paris, Dresden Staatskapelle, and the French, Spanish and Chinese National Orchestras; the Montreal and Dallas Symphonies; the American Ballet Theatre, the English National Ballet, the Australian National Ballet, the Bolshoi and Kirov Ballets; among others.

The Palacio de Bellas Artes has been used as a funeral venue for artists of Mexican national importance such as Frida Kahlo in 1954 and María Félix in 2002. The Palacio hosted the North American premiere of the film "Frida".

During the late 19th century and going into the first years of the 20th century, during Porfirio Díaz's 30-year rule of Mexico, there was a marked tendency to imitate European art, styles and customs. Following this tendency, a plan for a new Teatro Nacional (National Theater) was laid out and construction of a new building began on October 1, 1904. The plans were drawn up by the Italian architect Adamo Boari, who also designed at the same time the Palacio de Correos de Mexico, across the street, using state-of-the-art technology as was common in European theatres.

Construction was originally scheduled to be finished by 1908; however, it was delayed by problems with Mexico City's soil, notoriously muddy in composition and which led to the gradual subsidence of the building. The construction site was chosen by President Porfirio Díaz because it was located downtown (then Mexico City's financial and hosting district), on an elegant park promenade, and face-to-face with the then tallest buildings in the city, but the choice was not so favourable: indeed, the weight of the building is so massive that it has been sinking a few centimeters yearly since the completion of its construction.

Matters were further complicated by the beginning of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Boari left Mexico in 1916 and construction was virtually stopped until 1932, when works were resumed under Mexican architect Federico Mariscal; completion took place in 1934. The square with gardens and pegasus statues, devised by Boari himself, was not completed until 1994.

Rivera's "Man at the Crossroads" mural was originally painted for the Rockefeller Center in New York City. Rivera had finished ⅔ of the mural when the Rockefellers objected to an image of Vladimir Lenin in the mural. When Rivera refused to remove Lenin, his commission was cancelled and the mural was destroyed. Rivera repainted it a smaller scale at the Palacio in 1934 and renamed it "Man, Controller of the Universe".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palacio_de_bellas_artes

PALACIO DE BELLAS ARTES

TURTLES MOSAICS AT SECOND LIFE - B & B AQUARIUM WANDERING FISH AND BIRDS

Brad Kazakov

Star 181, 9, 302 (Mature) - B&B Aquarium - Wandering Fish & Birds -

Images by Loon San

TURTLES MOSAICS AT SECOND LIFE - B & B AQUARIUM WANDERING FISH AND BIRDS