Tierra Y Libertad

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.