Platicas (The Chat), circa 1955
Reva Brooks was a brilliant Canadian photographer who crossed artistic gazes with the fiery Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros in the late 1940s. Reva Brooks and her painter-musician husband, Leonard Brooks, began their love affair with Mexico in 1947 when they moved to the warmth of San Miguel de Allende from the artistic chill of Canada. Siqueiros arrived in San Miguel in 1948 and plunged the Brooks’ and that little colonial town into controversy and artistic ferment. The Brooks’ and other teachers were subjected to a dramatic deportation at gunpoint a year after Siqueiros and his students boycotted and closed the art school.
