A Living Archive of the Mexican Silver Renaissance
From the mountain town of Taxco emerged an extraordinary community of artists who transformed Mexico’s pre-Columbian visual heritage into a distinctly modern artistic language.
The Museum of Mexican Silver preserves and shares their story through a living archive of the people, objects, and ideas that shaped one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable -and least recognized - artistic movements.
1,473 Pieces · 301 Silversmiths · 765 Hallmarks
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Dispatches & Research
Field notes, guides, and dispatches from the archive
Background
The Taxco story
In 1931, the American architect and writer William Spratling opened a small workshop in Taxco, a silver-mining town in the mountains south of Mexico City. He paid local apprentices to translate his drawings into hand-fabricated silver pieces. Within a decade the workshop, Las Delicias, had trained a generation of silversmiths, and Taxco had become the center of a new Mexican decorative-arts tradition.
The Taxco school is the body of work those silversmiths and the workshops they founded produced from the 1930s through the 1970s. Its founder generation included Spratling, Héctor Aguilar, Antonio Pineda, the brothers of Los Castillo, Margot van Voorhies (Margot de Taxco), MATL (Matilde Poulat), Ana Núñez Brilanti, Frederick "Fred" Davis, and a handful of others. They worked in parallel with Mexico's post-revolutionary cultural project, on the same ground as the muralists and the photographers, and were collected alongside them.
What makes their work modern art is that it is authored. Designs originate with named artists, are executed by hand in named workshops, and carry hallmarks the way a painting carries a signature. The convention of dismissing it as souvenir jewelry, a convention this catalog rejects, ignores both the seriousness of the pieces and the documented record of who made them.
Artist spotlight
William Spratling
1900 - 1967 · Founder, Las Delicias
Spratling is the figure on whom the entire school rests. A Tulane-trained architect, illustrator, and friend of Diego Rivera, he arrived in Taxco in 1929 and opened Las Delicias two years later. His designs translated pre-Columbian motifs, Mexican vernacular forms, and a confident modernist line into hand-fabricated silver, and the workshop he ran trained Aguilar, the Castillos, Salvador Terán, Antonio Castillo, and others who went on to found the rest of the workshops in this catalog.
His holdings sit in the Smithsonian, the Met, LACMA, and the Museo Franz Mayer, alongside continuing presence in the auction market.
About
Why this catalog exists.
Mexican modernism in silver has been documented in pieces, by the handful of scholars and dealers who bothered, but never assembled into a single working catalog with museum-class records. This site is that attempt. All sources are cited, and every entry is built to be corrected. Where we are uncertain, we say so.
Dispatches
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Notes on new pieces, scholarship, and the market, sent occasionally, when there's something worth sending. No filler, no schedule for its own sake.
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