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Felipe Linares Mendoza Master cartonero · Mexico City
Palette

Information

Image credits and sources

Works and photographs

The works reproduced on this site belong to their makers, members of the Linares family, and are protected by copyright. Each record states to whom the piece is attributed and with what degree of certainty; the pieces photographed for the previous version of the site belong to Felipe Linares Vargas and remain his. Apart from the openly licensed images listed below, photographs of works were provided by the family; individual photo credits will be added to each image as soon as the workshop confirms them. No image on this site has been generated by artificial means.

Works held by museums (Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares, Brooklyn Museum, Fowler Museum, National Museum of the American Indian) are shown only as credited links to each institution’s records.

Video stills

The portraits of Felipe Linares Mendoza, the workshop images and the historical scenes are stills from television programs and videos: Judith Bronowski’s documentary (1975), Canal Once’s “Itinerario” (2016), MXPlus’s “El brillo de los años”, the Museum of International Folk Art’s “Alebrijes: A Linares Family Tradition”, Plus Ultra MX, El Tizoncito, Distrito Arte, Great Big Story and the Secretaría de Cultura. Each still is credited with its program, producer, year and timestamp. People are identified only by on-screen name cards, family confirmation or the program’s own identification; where there is none, the caption says so.

Openly licensed images

These photographs were published under Creative Commons licenses that allow them to be reproduced with credit to their title, their author and the license. The license covers the photograph; the work it shows still belongs to its maker and the maker’s heirs. Each photograph is also credited next to the image, wherever it appears on the site.

Documentary sources

The historical information comes from verifiable public sources and from the family’s testimonies. Every artwork record, every profile and every archive entry links to its sources and states its level of evidence (institutional record, press, bibliography, family testimony or pending verification). The main ones are:

  • Video testimonies of Pedro Linares López, Felipe Linares Mendoza, Leonardo Linares Vargas and Felipe Linares Vargas (family archive) and the programs linked on each profile. Every quotation on the site comes from there or from the press cited, with its speaker named.
  • Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares: records of “Alebrije” (1993), “Niño con calaverita” (1992), “Mujer con niño” (1992) and “Tzompantli” (2010).
  • Brooklyn Museum (2003.29), Fowler Museum at UCLA (X91.240A-D) and Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI_264101).
  • Centre Pompidou, catalogue of “Magiciens de la Terre” (1989); Radio Educación, “El mundo de papel de la familia Linares” (1989).
  • Susan N. Masuoka, “En Calavera: The Papier-Mâché Art of the Linares Family” (Fowler Museum, 1994), as cited in Kristin Congdon, “Of Corpse” (2003).
  • Secretaría de Cultura, Sistema de Información Cultural, Universidad Veracruzana (1990 National Prize), Government of Mexico City (2019 declaration).
  • Museum of International Folk Art and New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs (2022–2026); University at Albany; National Museum of Mexican Art; Tacoma Art Museum.
  • Press: Los Angeles Times (1991, 1994), The Observer (2000), Siempre! (2020), Excélsior (2019), Hyperallergic (2023), La Jornada (2026), KUNM and KRQE (2026), Zócalo / Agencia Reforma (2026); Google Doodles (2021); Wikipedia and Encyclopedia.com as secondary reference.

What has not been included

No personal dates, awards or exhibitions are published that are not documented in the sources above or marked as family recollection. No single year is fixed for the first alebrijes. Pending items are marked on the site as “to be confirmed”.