mexican clown

by Casey Holgado

Paper-maché created in Ms. Barillaro’s Art I.

Assignment: Every culture acknowledged the power of nature, and all feared and tried to communicate with its mysterious magical forces. Masks were symbols created as part of religious ceremonies. Research a culture and construct a representative mask.

Casey Holgado:

I created a mask based on the Mexican culture. The Mexican people use masks for many different things, but I wanted to focus on the Mexican people using clown and jester masks. The Mexican people used clown masks for more than just easy laughs of an audience. They used clown masks to express how they really felt about their superiors, government, and oppressors. The Mexican people were able to get away with saying a lot of things that would usually be taboo to say because of the fact that they were wearing a clown mask. So instead of the words coming from the individual it was more a collective conscience. They would use parody, acerbic, and humor to ridicule authority. The Mexican people still use clown masks today to tell what they think about the current authorities.

My mask is used for the same reasons of the clown masks stated above: ridiculing authority. The mask is made up of very bright and vibrant colors such as white, red and yellow. It also has a really big smiling mouth with paint to look like lipstick. It also has some very cheerful-looking eyes with small slits for the wearer to see out of. Although the mask looks very happy, the wearer is usually not happy with the authorities and expresses such ridicule with the mask on. The mask also symbolizes that people are supposed to always smile like everything is okay, but under the mask the people are truly hurting and are not in fact happy. My mask also has large floppy ears to look very humorous.