Jade bead necklace, Olmec, 1200-900 BC

from The Walters Art Museum

Olmec colossal head exhibited at the Hotel Nacional, Havana, 1974. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive.

Chavis Mármol, Tesla Crushed by an Olmec Head, 2024.

Olmec greenstone miniature mask (c. 900–400 BC)

from here

A replica of the figure of the 'Principe Olmeca' exhibited in the Museum of Cordoba, Veracruz, Mexico.

Does this count as a gijinka? Meh, I'll say it does!

Monsterverse Rodan!

Since his home is a volcanic island off the coast of Mexico, I leaned heavily on Mayan/Olmec inspiration.

They Came Before Columbus...

A Zapotec Terracotta Figural Urn of the Butterfly God (Ītzpāpālōtl) found at Monte Alban in Oaxaca, Mexico, Circa 200-600 AD. Sold at sotheby's in 2017 for $200,000

Jade mask, Olmec, 900 - 400 BC

from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Standing Figurine

Olmec, 1200-900 BC (Early Pre-Classic)

Jade mask, Olmec, 900-600 BC

from The Miho Museum, Japan

Chavis Mármol 2024

Chavis Mármol's Neo-Tamene (from the series)

Sculptor Chavis Mármol has never owned a car, but that’s never inhibited his drive. Earlier this month, the 42-year-old Mexico City-based artist (who travels largely by bicycle) dropped a nine-ton replica of an Olmec head onto the roof of a blue Tesla Model 3.

The car was donated by Colima 71,, a boutique hotel in Mexico City.

The work is a mix of humor and criticism that explores the Mexican pre-Hispanic past from a Western neo-colonial perspective.

All photos by and courtesy the artist

Sorry to bring this up again, but here we go.

This poem just came out. From a poetic side, it is brilliant. Perfect flow and construction, great imagery, excellent at showing and not telling. But is it factually accurate? No. No, it is not. And that's where we need to start caring.

There's a lot of excuses that art is just art and we can take liberties with it. But we're taking away the accomplishments of entire groups of people when we do stuff like this.

So, were the Olmec Africans? Were they Black? Cutting edge, modern pedagogy and research says NO.

This is the whole "Cleopatra was Black" thing again. We can't erase brown people from the history books. Just as not all history was white, not all history was black. There are indigenous, Asian, Middle Eastern, etc. people and we need to stop erasing their existence. We need to stop falsely attributing their accomplishments to people of other races and committing the same ideological frauds that early colonizers did when they said that great cities were made by white people and not the local inhabitants.

Ancient Black people accomplished great things. The Benin bronzes are amazing constructions. Ancient Middle Eastern people gave us written language for the first time. Stonehenge is a brilliant construction. The Terra Cotta army, the Great Wall of China, are amazing. And each belong to the people who built them and SHOULD NEVER be attributed to people who did not. These are items of culture, cultural heritage, and cultural property. They are not things to brainstorm over, falsely attribute, and create art with that spreads false information and lies.