Curator, Leah Dickerman: The Uprising was the only fully new composition of the five Mexican-themed panels that Rivera made for the 1931 exhibition.
You see the men wearing workers’ overalls and you see the women wearing modern day short dresses and short hair cuts and even earrings. It’s an urban industrial scene, and it’s a workers’ demonstration. The location is ambiguous. The dark skin tones that you see in this fresco suggest that it might be a Latin American site, but that’s not so clear.
In the very center of the composition is a woman actively asserting herself against the forces of oppression. She is pushing back the soldier’s arm as he holds a sword out, protecting her baby, but also her family. She becomes, in this picture, an emblem for the collective force of workers asserting themselves.
That type of subject matter would resonate with a contemporary US audience as well as a Mexican one, recalling the intense strikes and labor conflicts of the late ‘20s and the ‘30s.
The red flags you see in the background are a key signal of Rivera's own Communist background. He joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1922, when it was still very small. And he was even a member of its Executive Committee for a number of years, until he was expelled in 1929, in part because of his criticism of the party’s Stalinist orthodoxy.