Ladrilleros (Brick Makers) (from: Mexican Art - A Portfolio of Mexican People and Places)

Pablo O'Higgins

This lithograph is from a portfolio of ten black-and-white and two color lithographs depicting images of Mexican people engaged in daily activities, primarily labor and crafting, by ten different mid-century Mexican political printmakers and members of the 'Taller de Gráfica Popular' (TGP) print collective, printed on ivory wove paper, each signed in pencil at the lower right. The portfolio, "Mexican People and Places", was co-published in 1946 by the TGP and Associated American Artists (AAA) in New York in an edition of 250 portfolios.

"Ladrilleros" are Mexican adobe brickmakers/sellers. This composition shows a father and son, stacking dried adobe bricks on a pallet for future sale or use. In the background is what appears to be a partially built adobe home and other stacked adobe pallets. Around the world the traditional crafts have been passed on from parent to child, long traditions that are quickly being lost as technology and environmental changes encroach on the lives of ordinary people who have been self sustaining for hundreds of years.

Salt Lake City born Paul Higgins, who moved to Mexico in 1924 at age 20 and later changed his name to Pablo O'Higgins, exhibited in San Francisco at the Art Center Gallery (1925 and 1927) along with Diego Rivera, Jose Clement Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and other great Mexican masters. He had a one-man exhibition in New York at the John Levy Gallery (1931), which included over twenty of his works. He also exhibited in Cuba, Spain, Los Angeles and Mexico. It is imperative to mention that his work was included in the first large group exhibit of Mexican art held in the United States. He was a co-founder in 1937 of the important TGP in Mexico City along with Leopoldo Mendez, Luis Arnal and Raúl Anguiano.

He was the only non-native Mexican artist whose work was included in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibit "Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art" in New York (1940) and the Mexican Government has awarded him the highest honors in retrospectives of his work at El Palacio de Bellas Artes. It is evident that the influence and dominance of his political art continues with the inclusion of his works in major exhibitions of Latin American art throughout Mexico, the United States and in Britain. Pablo O'Higgins became a Mexican citizen in 1961.