Grandes Maestros del Arte Popular de Oaxaca is a landmark luxury publication, out of print, increasingly rare, and irreplaceable for anyone who loves Oaxacan art at its deepest level. Published in 2011 through the combined commitment of Fomento Cultural Citibanamex, the government of Oaxaca, and the Fundación Harp Helú, it took two years to produce and has never been replicated.
The volume profiles 88 master artisans selected from more than 200 candidates by editor Cándida Fernández de Calderón, director of Fomento Cultural Citibanamex and one of Mexico’s foremost authorities on folk art. Together they represent the full breadth of Oaxaca’s living craft traditions: Oaxacan wood carvings, barro negro, textiles, wood, metal, and fiber. Villages from the Central Valleys to the Sierra. More than half of the masters documented here are women. The result is a tapestry of art, 342 pages and 360 color photographs that move between the intimate and the monumental, from a weaver’s hands to the finished textile hanging in light.
The photography was conceived to match the subject's ambition. These are portraits of masterworks, shot with the seriousness they deserve. A bibliography and complete index of artists round out the volume.
The set is presented in a glossy hardcover with matching slipcase, a collector’s object in its own right, as visually striking on a shelf as it is absorbing in the hand.
