We will be participating in a MANIFEST EQUALITY an exhibit which gathers together a diverse array of hundreds of the nation’s most talented visual artists under one roof to celebrate that role and join with our LGBT friends, family members and co-workers to demand full and equal rights for all.

We each have a piece in the exhibit, Melanie has her print "Mis Mamas" which we printed as a limited edition screen print that's about two by three feet big. I have a poster I created for this exhibit that poses the question "Did we vote on your Marriage"? It features an illustration of a couple friends who are engaged and under current California Law do not have the right to marry each other.

MANIFEST EQUALITY
March 3rd – March 7th, 2010
1341 Vine Street,
LA, CA 

Tonight is the opening party for the Sol Collective, it's a cool cultural center in Sacramento. The cultural center has been around for a few years, but they had been with out a spcace for the last couple years since their last space had burned down. Melanie and I were invited by Miguel Bounce Perez to put up and installation, we built a 12' by 12' that will be moved into the meeting area once the exhibit is over. I hope that we have anothr opportunity to go back and do something else.

Here is a article that came out in the Sacramento Bee.

This past week was super productive, i printed four posters and drove up to Sacramento for a poster installation. There are a few prints that we had designed for a trip out to Mexico a couple years ago, the posters had been used in poster installations in various cultural centers in Ecatepec. These posters are a couple of our favorites and wanted to reprint to have them available for future poster installations and to all those people who always ask if we have those for sale.

I also had a chance to work on the third print for Favianna's set of poster, this one is of Meastro Carlos Cortez, there is one more left to print next week.

The big project of the week was an poster installation at Sol Collective gallery in Sacramento. Miguel Bounce Perez invited us to participate in the exhibit and we were super excited to be involved. We did this installation on a 12x12 foot wall we constructed, this wall took about a day and a half to make. The collective wants to keep it and move it into their meeting room once the exhibit is done.

I was going through our flat files the other day and came across the first poster I printed back in March of 2001. I printed this poster when I first started working at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in the San Francisco Mission District. I was hired as the graphic designer and one of my duties was to design posters for the exhibitions. This was my real introduction to screen printing, working with Juan R. Fuentes I started designing posters that he would print in Mission Grafica. Juan along with Calixto Robles (who teaches the screen printing classes at Mission Grafica) encouraged me to print my first poster after having completed my first poster design for the Solo Mujeres exhibit. They told me to design something simple, of course I did not listen and put together a four color poster and got to work. For my first try I think it was pretty good, the registration was pretty off and the black printed kinda off, but hey this was just the beginning. Over the next two years I spent all my free time working on posters and prints. Some posters went up in the streets of the Mission others went up in galleries.
In putting together this poster I was inspired by "Transgresores de la ley" a song by Tijuana No about the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. This has been one of my favorite bands since high school and their politics were always right on with my beliefs about immigration and land rights. Especially with their support for the Zapatistas who have been a major influence in my life and whose movement has continued to be a major theme in my artwork.

The quote in the poster is:
...Mientras que no, no
se han solucionado las cosas,
mientras que existe, existe:
el hambre, la miseria, las
enfermedades y toda clase
de injusticia, no vamos a
compremeter a dejar la armas...

There are times in life when you have the opportunity to take a step back and appreciate all the work you've done and feel a sense of accomplishment and pride and feel recharged to keep going. This was the feeling I had after setting up our exhibit at EastSide Arts Alliance, which features over 25 of Melanie and my prints and posters. As Dignidad Rebelde it was a real honor to have the opportunity to exhibit at EastSide, particularly because we feel that this is a very important community space that gets plenty of visitors.

 
To start off the week I printed a poster for the Tierra Y Libertad exhibit, this is the first time in a few years I had been able to work on a screen printed poster for an exhibit. I usually don't have the time to design and print a poster but since I have more time to invest in our art making I was super happy to have an opportunity to make these prints. I hope that by putting these up in the neighborhood we get some more foot traffic in the gallery and reach out to a new audience in our community.

I finally had the time to finish a print I had started working on a few weeks ago. I had stopped working because I needed to touch up the film separation for the last color. To touch up the separation I put the film over the matrix print (working proof of the print used for lining up colors and registering before printing) and make sure all of the areas where the ink will fall are well defined and inked in. This can be quite tedious but it's well worth the time when the final piece is printed and all the lines look crisp and clean.

I am also taking some time from printing our work and help a friend out. Favianna, who I founded the Taller Tupac Amaru studio with, needed some help printing some posters for an upcoming exhibit. A suite of four prints on red paper using only white and black ink. So far I have printed two of them. The first  portrait of Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez and the second of Malcolm X. These came out really great and am looking forward to printing a couple more pieces next week.

On Thursday we put up the Tierra Y Libertad exhibit at EastSide Arts Alliance, Macehualli asked us to have the exhibit up for the Treaty of Guadalupe event they were hosting. A couple friends from Macehualli came to help hand, they helped decided what prints went up and hang most of the pieces. Along with some help from Greg Morozumi who runs the gallery we finished hanging the show in a couple hours. We were really proud to have our work displayed during the Treaty of Guadalupe event, there was some cool workshops and plenty of people to checkout the art.

This past friday was the Commemorating the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo event at EasSide Arts Alliance put togther by Macehualli from Oakland. For the event they asked us to put up an exhibit in the EastSide gallery and will be up through the end of February.

"Wherever she went, she drew what she saw and donated her art to the cause."

Rini Templeton was a prolific graphic artist and huge inspiration to artist like me who strive to serve their communities in their struggles for liberation and a better life. She traveled all over documenting direct actions and demonstrations by drawing beautiful, simple, bold black and white illustrations that she referred to as "Xerox" art because of how easy they could be reproduced. I've heard many stories about Rini attending a protest, capturing a moment from that protest and then handing the illustration over to the organizer's for use on flyers, signs, banners, t-shirts...really anyway they needed. 

Rini travelled  quite a bit and was involved in several struggles. She the Cuban Revolution as an active member of Amigos de Cuba. While involved in this work she also founded the Taller de Grabado de la Catedral de la Habana (Havana Cathedral Printmaking Workshop-she was also a sculptor.

She lived in New Mexico for a while and was the staff artist for El Grito del Norte, a paper co-founded by Betita Martinez.

In the last part of the two decades of her art practice  Rini was as a part of the Taller de Gráfica Popular  in Mexico. 

Many of Rini's graphics are still widely used by social justice organizations for the same purposes she intended and for others she probably never imagined (Facebook events, websites etc). 

Inspired by Rini's life and her heart I have decided to add to the commons by creating new graphics in the same bold style. The decision to do so was pretty organic. I was at a meeting organization's from all over the region listening to people talk about their organization strategies when I became fixated on a woman who brought her baby to the meeting. I did a quick sketch of her with a ballpoint pen on the back of my notes.

When I got home I was looking over my notes and I started to feel alot of excitement about my drawing. I couldn't wait to share it with Jesus and to share my idea of creating this series. I quickly reworked the sketch into much cleaners pencil lines  on a fresh piece of paper. After the drawing was complete I scanned that and printed a version of the scan. I did this to avoid smudging the graphite from the pencil when I inked it. For most of my drawings I use Rotring Rapidograph pens to ink the black lines. The ink is really opaque and flows nicely when I am creating lines. 

This is just a start. As I write this and see my drawing next to Rini's I realize that I need to work on the width and boldness of my lines. I also need balance the amount of meetings I attend and the amount of actions/community based events I am at. I want to draw whatever I  see and give my heart and my work to my people, to my community and the movement.

I have a small print layed out that we will eventually produce as a screen print.  

This week was super busy, I printed three editions and still had time to run around getting supplies and table at an event to sell some prints.

The week started with printing Melanie's Iran solidarity poster, this is one of two pieces in which we both used the same source photo in creating our image. I really like Melanie's poster, it is a very well designed two color print, it has the text in Spanish, English and Farsi using the trilingual approach made popular by OSPAAAL (Organization of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa & Latin America).

Next was the Haiti solidarity poster which is a collaboration with EastSide Arts Alliance who designed the poster. This was printed to be used as a fundraiser with all the money raised going to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund. So far this has been selling pretty quickly, you can get yours here. Also thanks to Inkworks who I  can always count on when i need to get some paper cut.

In the middle of the week I had some time to clean the studio and get things organized, it had been a while since I swept and put things away but now I am ready to print some more.

Thursday I made a trip over to the Firehouse in west Oakland to cut some more paper, one of the guys was there printing a poster for AFI show later that night. Poster by Frank Zio.

I also exposed some screens for the next day of printing.

Later that night Melanie called me down to the Pearl in San Francisco where they were having a 75% off everything sale. We stocked up on plenty of paper all sizes and colors. This was great since we are working on so many prints I'm sure this paper will go fast.

Last thing for the week was my version of the Iran solidarity image. I printed a large format three color print of the same image Melanie used on her poster. I had a lot of fun printing this piece, using the one arm press made this a snap to print. I really like this print, using the grey paper and the nice earth tones, this has to be one of my favorite pieces I have created.

With the week over we are planning some new pieces coming up and some more collaborations.

We are very happy to announce the release of the first print Dignidad Rebelde publishes, "Haiti Will Rise Again" designed by EastSide Arts Alliance. This image was created by ESAA to share with the community and featured on their website for people to download and print to show their solidarity with the people of Haiti. We loved the image so much we decided to contact ESAA and see if they were interested in having the design transformed into a screen print and used to raise funds for Haiti, all money raised will go to Haiti Emergency Relief Fund. They were very happy about the idea and we got to work. Now that the print is complete we are putting it up for sale, you can buy the print form us here on our website or by contacting ESAA.

This is the statement written by EastSide:

"EastSide has produced an image to counter the perception that Haiti is a victimized, poor country by their own bad luck and ineptitude. This racist narrative only serves to erase the strength and revolutionary spirit that defines this Black nation, the first liberated Black Republic."

Click here to buy the print.

This week has been great, I was able to spend most of the week in the studio working on a couple prints, one of Melanie's designs and one of my prints. It is a lot of fun having all this time to make art, it makes me feel very fulfilled as an artist and increasingly I will be spending more time in the studio. The decision was made because Melanie and I have been designing so many prints and posters but we have not had enough time to print them all. On top of this we have projects coming up and need time to be able to focus on those. In the coming months I will be posting more about the prints we are working on, documenting all the art we are making and sharing it with our community.

This week I was printing Melanie's Lila Downs piece which i have been working on for the past month and it is almost finished, pictures of that print to come.

I started working on a print of a Iranian protester, I had come across the a photo when the protests in Iran first started. The look in the woman's eyes were super intense and the rocks in her hands make her look fierce. This is a 22"x30" print and to produced it, I use a one arm press which allows me to print larger areas by using an attachment to run the squeegee across the screen. Using the one arm makes it easier to print large areas with out breaking my back.

I'm going to keep posting more pictures every week of stuff we're printing, there should be some cool art coming!