Printing The Revolution

This book is associated with the exhibition of the same name, due to open at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in the fall of 2020. It is edited by E. Carmen Ramos, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and includes essays by Ramos, Tatiana Reinoza, Terezita Romo, and Claudia Zapata. These essays will discuss how, during 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 each 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--and current--social movements and the ways in which Chicanx artists since then have advanced innovative printmaking practices attuned to social justice.