Start date: November 20, 2020
End date: August 8, 2021
Location: Smithsonian American Art Museum (8th and G Streets, NW)
Events | Lectures

Celebrate the opening of this landmark exhibition with a moderated virtual preview featuring artists Juan Fuentes, Ester Hernandez, and Zeke Peña and notable collectors Gil Cárdenas, Ricardo and Harriett Romo, Rosa Terrazas, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. Join us and explore the importance of Chicanx graphics in American visual culture, Thursday, November 19, at 7 p.m.

REGISTER FOR VIRTUAL CONVERSATION SERIES BY VISITING: https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/chicano-graphics

Tuesday, January 26, 6:30 p.m. ET

Cross-Generational Mentorship and Influence

Speakers:

  • Juan Fuentes, artist
  • Dignidad Rebelde (Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes), artists

  • Terezita Romo, art historian, curator, and a lecturer and affiliate faculty member at the University of California, Davis

Learn More

 

Thursday, February 18, 6:30 p.m. ET

From Black and Brown Solidarity to Afro-Latinidad

Speakers:

  • Malaquias Montoya, artist
  • Favianna Rodriguez, artist
  • Kaelyn Rodríguez, assistant professor in art history at Santa Monica College
  • Moses Ros-Suárez, artist

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Thursday, March 25, 6:30 p.m. ET

The Legacy of Printmaking

Speakers:

  • Jos Sances, artist
  • Pepe Coronado, founder of Coronado Print Studio and founding member of the Dominican York Proyecto GRAFICA
  • Tatiana Reinoza, assistant professor of art history at the University of Notre Dame

 

Thursday, April 15, 6:30 p.m. ET

Spirituality and Indigeneity within Chicanx Art

Speakers:

  • Enrique Chagoya, printmaker and professor in the department of art and art history at Stanford University
  • Yreina D. Cervántez, artist and professor emeritus in the department of Chicana/o studies at California State University at Northridge
  • Claudia Zapata, curatorial assistant for Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

 

Thursday, May 13, 6:30 p.m. ET

Creating in a Digital Sphere

Speakers:

  • Michael Menchaca, artist
  • Julio Salgado, artist and social justice activist
  • Claudia Zapata, curatorial assistant for Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

In the 1960s, activist Chicano artists forged a remarkable history of printmaking that remains vital today. Many artists came of age during the civil rights, labor, anti-war, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements and channeled the period’s social activism into assertive aesthetic statements that announced a new political and cultural consciousness among people of Mexican descent in the United States. ¡Printing the Revolution! explores the rise of Chicano graphics within these early social movements and the ways in which Chicanx artists since then have advanced innovative printmaking practices attuned to social justice.

More than reflecting the need for social change, the works in this exhibition project and revise notions of Chicanx identity, spur political activism and school viewers in new understandings of U.S. and international history. By employing diverse visual and artistic modes from satire, to portraiture, appropriation, conceptualism, and politicized pop, the artists in this exhibition build an enduring and inventive graphic tradition that has yet to be fully integrated into the history of U.S. printmaking.

This exhibition will be the first to unite historic civil rights era prints alongside works by contemporary printmakers, including several that embrace expanded graphics that exist beyond the paper substrate. While the dominant mode of printmaking among Chicanx artists remains screen-printing, this exhibition will feature works in a wide range of techniques and presentation strategies, from installation art, to public interventions, augmented reality and shareable graphics that circulate in the digital realm. The exhibition will also be the first to consider how Chicanx mentors, print centers and networks nurtured other artists, including several who drew inspiration from the example of Chicanx printmaking.

Artists and collectives featured in the exhibition include Rupert GarcíaMalaquias MontoyaEster Hernandez, the Royal Chicano Air Force, Elizabeth SiscoLouis HockDavid Avalos, Jesus Barraza, Melanie CervantesSandra C. FernándezJuan de Dios Mora, the Dominican York Proyecto GRAFICAEnrique ChagoyaRené CastroJuan Fuentes, and Linda Lucero, among others.

¡Printing the Revolution! features 119 works drawn from SAAM’s pioneering collection of Latinx art. The museum’s Chicanx graphics holdings rose significantly with an important gift in 1995 from the renowned scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. Since then, other major donations and an ambitious acquisition program has built one of the largest museum collections of Chicanx graphics on the East Coast.

This exhibition is organized by E. Carmen Ramos, curator of Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, with Claudia Zapata, curatorial assistant. The museum will publish a major catalogue with essays by Ramos and Zapata, as well as contributions by Terezita Romo and Tatiana Reinoza, leading scholars of Chicanx and Latinx graphics.