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Indigenous Imagery in the Art of Mariana Castillo Deball

By Verónica Flom

The work of multidisciplinary artist Mariana Castillo Deball explores the use and abuse of indigenous imagery.

In the late 1970s, the makers of an American antipsychotic drug called Stelazine were looking for a way to market their product to consumers in magazines and medical journals. The campaign they settled on featured indigenous masks and headdresses from Africa and Canada alongside slogans like, “Lift the mask of schizophrenic withdrawal.” For a version of the advertisement in Mexico, they opted for local traditional masks instead.

The recontextualization of indigenous heritage and imagery (of which that campaign was a particularly egregious example) occupies an important place in the...

Read this article on the Americas Quarterly website. | Subscribe to AQ.

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