“Soul of God” – the Life & Works of Utah Raised Mexican Muralist Pablo O’Higgins – A Conversation with Susan Vogel, Fanny Guadalupe Blauer and Catherine Aviles (Season 4, Ep. 5)

**Brad Westwood** (0:07)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history produced by the Utah Department of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting and the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, I hope this is the place. Today, we're speaking about Pablo O'Higgins, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Presbyterian from Utah, who became a celebrated mid 20th century Mexican muralist.
Co-hosting with me today is my co-producer, Catherine Aviles.
Joining us today is the author of Becoming Pablo O'Higgins, Susan Vogel, along with the director of Artis de Mexico in Utah, Fanny Guadalupe Blauer. Susan and Fanny, thank you for joining Catherine and I for the show today.

**Susan Vogel** (1:10)
Thank you so much for having us.

**Fanny Guadalupe Blauer** (1:12)
Thank you for having us.

**Brad Westwood** (1:14)
Susan Vogel is a freelance writer, journalist, and attorney with degrees from San Francisco State University and the University of California Hastings College of Law. She also studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico City.
In 1990, she received a grant from Utah Humanities to research the Utah-born Mexican muralist Pablo O'Higgins. In 2010, Susan co-founded the Artis de Mexico, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to build communities in Utah through the appreciation of our many cultural connections and the creation of art. The organization has some wonderful outreach programs, including short documentaries, some created by my co-producer Catherine Aviles, lectures, traveling exhibits, and podcasts that re-examine Mexico through its art. Entitled, help me with the pronunciation, friends.

**Fanny Guadalupe Blauer** (2:14)
Novas Voces.

**Brad Westwood** (2:16)
To learn more, we urge you to go to www.artes.mexut.org.
Fanny Blauer is currently the Director of Artes de Mexico, Utah, and was born and raised in Mexico City. She graduated from the Institut Politico National and holds a Certificate of Anthropology of Art from the Centre for Research and Advanced Studies of Social Anthropology. Fanny serves as a Community Liaison at the Natural History Museum of Utah, and is a member of various Diversity and Inclusion Committees throughout the State of Utah. She also is part of the National Leadership Project for Peer Alliance, Gender and Equity managed by the Science Museum of Minnesota. Once again, Fanny, once again, Susan, thank you for coming and being a part of Speak Your Piece, and thank you, Catherine, for being here as well.
Catherine is going to have the honors hereafter to engage our guests, and I'll be taking a back seat and hoping that we can all engage in this conversation. Catherine.

**Catherine Aviles** (3:30)
Thank you, Brad, and thank you Fanny and Susan for joining me.
So I'm going to dive in to question number one. For our listeners who may be new to art history, can you both tell us who Pablo O'Higgins was? What were some of his achievements, and why is he an important artist in both Mexico and Utah?

**Susan Vogel** (3:54)
So I thought maybe it'd be great to have Fanny start in talking about the mural movement in Mexico and what it was about in general, and then I can start talking about how Pablo got involved with it.

**Fanny Guadalupe Blauer** (4:04)
Sure. Well, muralism is known as the artistic representation that expresses cultural values. It started back in the 1920s when there was a concern defining what was to be Mexican, and this as a way to celebrate the post-revolutionary movement in Mexico.
It was also a way to celebrate and to acknowledge the values of the indigenous people as major root of our identity as being called Mexicans. Before that, the art in Mexico did not represent well the authenticity of the indigenous people of Mexico.
And also, muralism played an important role as a way of expression to link art as a tool to be a social component and a political component. And muralism really questioned a lot about what is art and who owns art, because muralism is public space. It's art that belongs to the people. And it's art that is produced by the people. So muralism then is created with an eye that it's owned by the people and done by the people. It's a current of art that reflects on the dreams, the nightmares, the hunger, the dignity, and it captures the reality of the oppression as well as the celebration of accomplishments in our history.
Muralism is basically street art and it's a perfect example of the talent of our people, of the color of our people, the identity of our people. And muralism, you can say, it's part of the revolution. It's part of that revolutionary movement that invites to a social change.