Diego Rivera

Rivera and the Mexican muralists put art on the walls of ministries, schools and markets so that people who never entered a gallery would meet their own history every day. His frescoes in the Ministry of Education and the National Palace in Mexico City, painted with teams of plasterers and assistants, turned staircases and courtyards into public history books. Contest came with the territory: his Rockefeller Center mural in New York was destroyed in 1934 for including Lenin, while his Detroit Industry murals survived a campaign to whitewash them.