Posts from Oaxaca: 'La Tinta Grita' at Fowler Museum at UCLA
In Mexico's turbulent state, woodblock prints are a means of public protest. As the title states: 'The Ink Shouts.'
MEXICO'S southern state of Oaxaca has two dominant character traits. It's a hub of artistic creativity, known for the superlative caliber of its rugs, whimsical carved animals and brittle black pottery. And it's a hotbed of political discontent, a long-oppressed region whose heavily indigenous population chafes under crushing poverty, ethnic discrimination and autocratic political rule.
Those twin facets come together in a timely exhibition of graphic design prints and stencils at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, “La Tinta Grita — The Ink Shouts: The Art of Social Resistance in Oaxaca, Mexico.” Co-curated by John Pohl, a UCLA archaeologist, and Kevin McCloskey, a professor of communication design at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, the show is the first U.S. public display of work produced by a Oaxacan artists' collective in support of the mass social protests that rocked the region beginning in spring 2006 and continue to this day. It opens today and runs through Dec. 7.
Most if not all of the 33 works in the show were made by members of the shadowy Assembly of Revolutionary Artists of Oaxaca, whose manifesto states its mission as being "to raise consciousness about the social reality of the modern form of oppression that our people face." None of the artists in the exhibition is identified by name, in keeping with ASARO's collectivist makeup.
"They're trying to be as anonymous as possible for several reasons," Pohl says of the artists. "One is, they want to avoid incarceration." The works also don't have titles because they weren't designed to be hung in art museums, says Pohl. "They're designed to be plastered on walls."
Even if you know little or nothing about the complex political events that inspired it, the art's technical skill and emotive power is hard to miss. Some prints, such as one depicting a police helicopter shaped as a giant flying skull, and another depicting the polarizing Oaxaca state governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, as the devil, are darkly satirical. Other prints, including a stunningly textured woodblock portrait of the Mexican Revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, are sensuous, impressionistic, even beautiful. Several works incorporate skeletal human figures and skulls inspired by the turn-of-the-century political cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada.
- New Institute to Promote Mexico Ties, Culture Feb 23, 1991
- Oaxaca calls upon its artists Dec 29, 2006
- A Learning Link to the Museum of Latin American Art Feb 28, 2001
