Abstract
The presented paper analyzes the phenomenon of community-based public art practice in Mexico using two local communities as the case studies: Pueblo Nuevo in the State of Oaxaca and Reynosa Tamaulipas in Mexico City. The aim of the article is to expose the role of collaborative art practice in community building, where communities search for their version of local identity (Brubaker 2006) and means of negotiating government policy and culture making.
Although the examined communities are centered around art practices, their social, politic aims and struggles go far beyond the art. In Mexico, where public art practice has deep tradition, the visual research seems to be particularly efficient in understanding collaborative tendencies in contemporary urban and semirural societies.
In this paper, I'm building on my findings of long-term field research focusing on the function of visual communication in the process of negotiation and shaping national identities.