Shifra Goldman, activist and scholar, dies

In the early 1970s, when Shifra Goldman proposed a doctoral dissertation on modern Mexican art, her professors at UCLA sneered. Compared to European art, the art of Latin America was, in their view, imitative, too political, unworthy of serious scholarly attention.

But Goldman, a scrappy civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activist who went back to school in her mid-30s, refused to consider a more mainstream topic. Describing herself years later as a person who was "born on the margins, lived on the margins and . . . always sympathized with the margins," she bided her time for several years until a more open-minded professor arrived who was willing to supervise her research.

She not only published her dissertation as a book, "Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change" (1981), but also went on to become a seminal figure in the rise of Latin American and Chicano art history as legitimate fields of study.

Goldman died Sept. 11 in Los Angeles of Alzheimer's disease, said her son, Eric Garcia. She was 85.

Calling herself an activist art historian, Goldman was an early champion of Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros and persisted for decades to preserve his last public work in the United States: the "America Tropical" mural at Olvera Street. The Getty Conservation Institute is collaborating with the city of Los Angeles to rescue the rare mural.

A studio art major at UCLA, she joined a student boycott of Westwood barbers who refused haircuts to African-American veterans of World War II attending UCLA on the GI Bill. She left UCLA before earning her degree and immersed herself in the nascent Mexican-American civil rights movement led by activist Bert Corona. Unsatisfied with her life, she returned to UCLA, completing her bachelor's degree in art in 1963. She earned a master's from Cal State L.A. in 1966 and a doctorate from UCLA in 1977, both in art history.