Glorious Collision: A Mural Torn by Geometry and Power

This reinterpretation of Diego Rivera’s  Glorious Victory is titled  Glorious Collision , and it deliberately fractures the clarity of Rivera’s original narrative with sharp-edged cubism and symbolic abstraction. Rivera’s unmistakable language—his muralistic articulation of political satire and class conflict—remains present but is partially obscured, refracted through shards of modern disillusionment. This piece is less an homage than a conversation, interrogating the glory that Rivera named, challenging the rhetoric of victory, and reflecting the broken architecture of political theater.  

At the core of the image, the handshake between American secretary of state John Foster Dulles and a military figure—once central in Rivera’s denunciation of U.S. imperialism in Guatemala—is preserved. But in  Glorious Collision , it floats in a liminal, fractured midsection, almost sandwiched and suffocated between two collapsing worlds. The scene is still charged with Rivera’s visual sarcasm—his painted bomb bearing Dwight Eisenhower’s face, the submissive leaders, the mercenary violence—but now it trembles beneath the weight of collapsing geometry. There’s no stability. This is not a mural on a wall—it is a mural cracking within a consciousness.  

The top portion of the piece erupts into cubist chaos—shards of burnt sienna, sepia, and rust slicing diagonally, their edges converging toward a vague jet form, a modern war machine abstracted and intrusive. This machine is no longer just a weapon—it’s a visual metaphor for industrial dehumanization. Its abstractness allows it to represent not just one plane, but the ideology of mechanized war itself. The reds and browns in this segment convey a sense of scorched earth and relentless firepower, but also rust—suggesting decay within the machinery of diplomacy.  

The mural's lower section dissolves into a puzzle of distorted black lines and fragmented cream blocks, borrowing from synthetic cubism but twisting it with an expressionist edge. It reflects a broken foundation—the literal ground Rivera’s characters once stood upon now rearranged into a chaotic, indecipherable grid. This grounding becomes symbolic: the structural systems of Rivera’s time—labor, agriculture, political alliances—are no longer coherent. In this reimagination, they have lost their axis, pulled apart by the pressures of modern geopolitics and historical reinterpretation.  

Color in this piece does not obey natural rules; it obeys emotional gravity. The middle—the heart of the original mural—retains Rivera’s bold tropical palette: deep greens of banana leaves, bright reds of campesino shirts, golden earth, and the tan-beige of government uniforms. These colors pulse with Rivera’s revolutionary energy. They represent life, propaganda, survival, and satire. But as one’s gaze ascends or descends, the palette mutates. Above, it scorches. Below, it pales. The hues lose saturation as they fracture into abstraction. This desaturation is a metaphor for disillusionment—for the fading clarity of “glory” under the lens of hindsight.  

The handshake itself becomes a quiet center of irony. It is placed almost reverently, a floating emblem framed by the surrounding visual noise. Yet the hand that extends from Rivera’s bomb is stiff, puppet-like, while the soldier’s smile is glazed, his helmet casting a shadow of complicity. My decision to not alter their expressions but instead distort the framing around them was a way of saying: the farce is visible, but only when we look beyond the handshake.  

When I created  Glorious Collision , I wanted to test the limits of memory within protest art. Rivera’s original mural was clear-eyed in its satire. He drew villains and victims with unapologetic confidence. But today, our world is less sure. The truths we once knew fracture under media noise, global shifts, and historical rewriting. I didn’t want to correct Rivera—I wanted to layer his certainty with today’s fragmentation. In this piece, I am both witness and skeptic. The “glorious victory” feels less like triumph and more like fallout.  

There is no single focal point. The eye is meant to wander, pulled up into jagged geometry, then down into visual rubble. This movement mirrors the emotional trajectory of the piece: outrage becomes confusion, which becomes reflection. The piece ends not with Rivera’s clear declaration, but with a question—what remains of victory when all sides have rewritten the terms?