Past Events

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

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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 García, Malaquias Montoya, Ester Hernandez, the Royal Chicano Air Force, Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, David Avalos, Jesus Barraza, Melanie Cervantes,  Sandra C. Fernández, Juan de Dios Mora, the Dominican York Proyecto GRAFICA, Enrique Chagoya, René Castro, Juan 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.

Announcing a free online presentation: : “Melanie Cervantes on becoming an artist” (Rated PG-13) , Sunday, April  5, 2020 11:30am-1:30pm PST. If you would like to participate please email melaniecervantes@berkeley.edu to sign up for the Zoom meeting. I will email you all of the details. Participation is limited to 300 people.

I will be telling the story of how I ended up becoming an artist, who shaped my art and how my practice has evolved over time. We will have a significant amount of time allocated for questions and answers and some discussion.
I am so happy to announce my first online offering in a series of talks and workshops I am calling “Creative Connection in the time of “social distance”” and will have a particular focus in two tracks.

Track one will present slideshow based lectures on a variety of topics including art history, sharing stories about the trajectory of our work, how we sustain ourselves as artists and many other topics.

Track two will focus on hands on art making/skill sharing that people can participate in by using materials they likely have at home already.
Since many of you have asked if the content of these online offerings is appropriate for kids I have decided to use the motion picture rating system to guide potential participants/adults in deciding if their kids should participate. (G, PG PG-13,R)

I will be offering the same presentation twice a week. One will happen on a weekday in the evening and the other will happen on a weekend in the the late morning/early afternoon (Pacific Standard Time).