Ex-voto (derived from the Latin phrase for “in accordance with a vow”) paintings are thank-you notes to the divine, created or commissioned in gratitude for saintly intercession or answered prayers. Ex-votos had long been a part of Catholic tradition in Europe, and wealthy families in Mexico began commissioning them on canvas during the colonial period (the elaborate Ex-voto of Josefa Peres Maldonado in the collection of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, for example, dates to 1777). After inexpensive sheet tin became more readily available in the 19th century, middle- and working-class people also began making ex-votos on metallic supports to give thanks for everyday miracles—recovery from illness, good harvests during a drought, release from prison. These ex-votos, in which small figures recreate the perilous scene described in the inscription below, originally hung in churches and pilgrimage sites. Since the 1920s, they have been collected as arte popular (folk art) and defined as a national art form. For modernists including Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, the freewheeling combinations of words and pictures, humans and saints, boring daily life and breathtaking miracles seemed to disregard the rules of academic painting and prefigure Surrealism. The subjects represented in this group ex-votos—car accidents, workplace injuries, sick farm animals—are typical of those made in the 20th century; historians have argued that they offer insights into the daily lives of people who may not have left behind many other records.

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