A01=John Virtue
Author_John Virtue
Category=AFC
Category=AGA
Category=AGB
Category=AJCD
Category=DNB
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9780773522985
- Publication Date: 25 Oct 2001
- Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
- Publication City/Country: CA
- Product Form: Hardback
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In 1947 Leonard and Reva Brooks left for Mexico where Leonard planned to study painting for a year. In Mexico they discovered a vibrant, sometimes even dangerous, society and a dynamic artistic community, unlike the mundane world they had left behind in Canada with its stale and unwelcoming artistic scene. Invigorated by their new environment Leonard and Reva ended up staying for over half a century, playing a key role in establishing San Miguel de Allende as a world-famous art colony. In this new biography, John Virtue chronicles the lives of these two important artists and offers an intimate look at these complex and creative people. Virtue describes how they were caught up in the McCarthy era of Communist witch hunts and blacklisted in the United States. He details their close friendships with luminary figures such as Marshall McLuhan, Earle Birney, and the Mexican art icon David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as a host of others. As Leonard became a fixture in the Mexican art scene Reva's photography quickly garnered international recognition, applauded by photographers Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.
In 1975 the San Francisco Museum of Art selected her as one of the top fifty female photographers of all time. With tales of deportations, shootouts, murder attempts, failures, and triumphs, Leonard and Reva Brooks is a biography of two creative people caught up in interesting times.
John Virtue is director, International Media Center, Florida International University, and the author of Leonard and Reva Brooks: Artists in Exile in San Miguel de Allende.
