Rivera in Poconos

I wish to express deep gratitude to Lorenza Munoz for providing a broad historical context to the art of Diego Rivera now being presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (“Myth and Mystique,” May 24).

As a young boy in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I was fortunate to spend my summers at Unity House, the Pocono Mountains hotel built and run by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union for its vacationing blue-collar membership.

The high-ceilinged main lobby of the “administration building” was most striking for the multiple-panel mural created by none other than Diego Rivera. As a child who was free to roam the vast and beautiful grounds of this “socialist workers’ paradise,” I spent many a worthwhile hour gazing at the panels, and only dimly understood their content and message at the time: a sweeping, visual lecture on the history of the United States with emphasis on social injustice.

As a child I did not relate to Rivera as an artist but as a visual storyteller of the darker aspect of human character. Now Munoz has given me a hint of the social and historical threads that wove the lives of my own relatives into the same tapestry with Rivera’s. I look forward to viewing the exhibit for very personal reasons.

JEFF SCHOENWALD

Thousand Oaks

I have read with interest several pieces you have printed related to the Diego Rivera exhibit at the L.A. County Museum of Art, but none have alluded to the Artes de Mexico Festival. This four-month, 300-plus-events, home-grown, volunteer-driven, grass-roots, Mexican/Mexican-American/Chicano visual and performing arts festival enhanced the 1991 “Mexico: Splendors of 30 Centuries” exhibition.

For many Los Angeles-based artists, Artes de Mexico was a turning point, a coming of age. To be written out of the history that led to the splendid Rivera show at LACMA is troubling and hurtful for the hundreds of volunteers who worked on the festival.

SAMUEL MARK

Los Angeles