Toasting Siqueiros’ revolutionary spirit

When Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros died in 1975, his legacy included not only a wealth of massive works -- including Olvera Street’s 1932 mural, “American Tropical” -- but also an idiosyncratic photographic archive compiled over four decades and separated into such categories as “misery,” “workers and industry,” “landscape” and “archeology.”

Siqueiros’ directive was that his expansive archive, some 10,000 images strong, housed at Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros in Mexico City, be made available to artists after his death as a resource to inform their work.

Several contemporary artists have used the archive to do just that as part of a new traveling exhibition, “An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life.” Their new works, created over the last two years -- based on, inspired by and in response to images in Siqueiros’ archive -- will be on display at the Gallery at REDCAT in downtown L.A., where the exhibition runs Friday through April 3.

Organized by guest co-curators Lauri Firstenberg and artist Anton Vidokle, the exhibition complements an online initiative at e-flux.com, a project-based contemporary art company, where about half of the Siqueiros archive’s images have been digitized for viewing.

“It was a question of use,” Firstenberg says. “How would other artists take on this image bank and to what end, for what purpose? How would it be useful to them and why would contemporary artists be interested in this body of work?”

The results include sculpture, installations, photography and paintings, and, in conjunction with the show, three billboards designed by L.A.-based artists Ruben Ochoa, Daniel Joseph Martinez and Mark Bradford will go up at different L.A. locations beginning Wednesday.

The exhibition’s conceptual framework invited individual artists’ reactions to Siqueiros’ archive not as an homage, but as “a kind of provocation.”

The new works reflect not only an interest in Siqueiros’ art and its intersection of aesthetics and politics, Firstenberg notes, but also the participating artists’ desire to see “an unpolarized worldview in relationship to artistic practice and social endeavor.”

Among other “intergenerational and international” artists taking part are Paris-based Anri Sala, Ken Lum of Canada and Mexico City’s Carlos Amorales.

-- Lynne Heffley