Mexican Calendar Girls/Chicas de Calendarios Mexicanos: Golden Age of Calendar Art: 1930-1960/La Epoca de Oro del Arte de Los Calendarios: 1930-1960

by Angela Villalba

Book Overview

A truly popular art form, the glamorous paintings of Mexican calendar girls have a long and fascinating historyas advertisements, enticements, and emblems of Mexican cultural heritage and pride. The result of years of research, this playful and informative book reproduces more than 150 vibrantly colorful calendar images, plus archival photographs and other materials that illuminate their creation. A fully bilingual text gives an overview of the calendars' social and cultural history, along with biographies of the talented artists who created them. Also including a foreword by the renowned Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsivis, "Mexican Calendar Girls" presents this popular and delightful art as never before.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811853152
• ISBN13: 9780811853156
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (CA)
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.1" x 10.4"

Customer Reviews

I love it!

I absolutely love this book. The pictures in it are all so beautiful and so reflective of traditional Mexican culture. I even went to the lengths of cutting the binding of the book and cutting out the pictures that I most loved and pasted them on my wall. That would be my only suggestion to the author, make the pictures where they can be pulled out and framed. They are just that stunning!

Mexican Calendar Girls

This a wonderful book. The illustrations are beautiful, vibrant, and an excellent example of Mexican art. This is very nice coffee table book.

unbelieveable--historical--exciting

very well written. interesting historical account of artists and their methods and subjects. have never seen a greater accumulation of beautiful images, colorful-exiting-romantic portraits. full of 'old time' detail and glamour. hard to put down.

Highly Recommended insight into Mexican Culture

I highly recommend the picture book on Mexican Calendar Girls. The author really did her homework and touched on an aspect of Mexican Popular Art that played on cultural symbols. From La Adelita to La Malinche and even the venerated Virgen de Guadalupe, this artwork found in kitchens, neighborhood tienditas or bakeries evoked an idealized Mexico and its various viewpoints of womenhood. These images are the cultural equivalent of the Norman Rockwell paintings that evoked an idealized North American culture to generations. Angela Villaba hit a homerun with her book as far as my family was concerned. I gave it to my mother who is an educational advocate for multicultural education here in the Southwest and she could not put the book down. Sergio S. Guerrero Jr. El Paso, Texas

Excellent gift for the Latina feminist!

This book is a compilation of the many important roles Mexican women have played in history through the use of calendar art. The photos are colorful and demonstrate the diversity of Mexicanas. What a delightful way to teach the history! This book will surely be appreciated and enjoyed by art lovers, history lovers, women and men alike.