The person in charge of the selection and mounting of the exhibition, as well as its catalogs, was the Austrian immigrant and art curator, René d’Harnoncourt (1901-68), who had just arrived in Mexico a couple of years earlier. Having worked for the Galería de Arte Mexicano (GAM), owned by Fred Davies, he had become a specialist in Mexican popular art. Given his knowledge and dedication to this field, d’Harnoncourt served as an advisor to the Ministry of Public Education as well as to Dwight Morrow, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico at the time (1927-30). During that period, d’Harnoncourt was in favor of preserving and disseminating the traditional crafts, which were starting to be threatened by a lack of markets and the modernization of public taste. For his part, d´Harnoncourt understood both the significance as well as the political value that could accrue to Mexico from the protection and exhibition of this sort of crafts. At the international level, this was a time when questions were being raised about Mexico’s social, political and cultural development, and therefore, its economic future.In subsequent decades, René d’Harnoncourt would become the director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York (1949-67).