Alfred Jones

How do class, race, and gender affect our engagement with printed media? For the upper-class white woman in Renoir’s painting, reading a fashion magazine is a private pleasure—not a matter of public or political engagement. The print Mexican News, on the other hand, depicts media consumption in a social setting, where people from different classes and racial backgrounds have gathered. In this case, the news concerns Mexico’s loss of territory to the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). Though their reading experience is shared, the group’s lack of social cohesion is apparent. The artist hints at this marginalization by placing the African American figures at lower right and the woman peeking from a window at upper right, barely in the frame.