Library Exhibition: "Chican@s (re)Imagining Zapata"
Event Date:
Wednesday, May 1, 2013 -
10:00am to 5:00pm
Event Location:
CSRC Library - 144 Haines Hall
The CSRC welcomes you to view the exhibition Chican@s (re)Imagining Zapata, curated by Julia Fernandez and installed in the library through May 10, 2013.
Chican@s (re)Imagining Zapata examines the iconography of Emiliano Zapata, the famous revolutionary general, in prints, posters, and newspapers produced from the 1940s through 2011. Drawing exclusively from collections at the CSRC, curator Julia Fernandez compares prints made in Mexico City in the 1940s and 1950s at El Taller de Gráfica Popular with illustrations in issues of El Malcriado, the United Farm Workers newspaper, from the 1960s and 1970s, and with posters and prints created by Chicano artists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 2011. The exhibition reveals how iconic images of Zapata and other heroes of the Mexican Revolution were used to inspire Chicana/os to imagine their own social and political revolution in the United States. Although many of the works in Chican@s (re)Imagining Zapata quote familiar depictions of militant leaders, one poster, featuring a young woman draped in bandoliers, questions the role that the masculine imagery had for Chicanas as well as Chicanos during the rise of the Chicano Movement.
The exhibition will be on view April 15-May 10, 2013. CSRC library exhibitions are FREE and viewable during regular library hours: Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. A digital exhibition containing the same images will be on view beginning April 15, 2013 at postersofrevolution.omeka.net. All of the images are from CSRC collections.
About the curator:
Julia Fernandez is senior art history student and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow at UCLA. Chican@s (re)Imagining Zapata was inspired by her thesis, “The Art of the United Farm Workers and the Visual Language of Revolution in the U.S. and Mexico,” researched under the guidance of professors Judith F. Baca and Charlene Villaseñor-Black. Her study looks at Chicano appropriation of Mexican iconography to create what Benedict Anderson termed “an imagined community” among people who could relate to the imagery and its message. This fall, Fernandez will continue her research on political Chicana/o and Mexican art as a PhD student in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego.
Image: "Solidarity Farmworkers, Tierra y Libertad," ca. 1960s and 1970s, based on an image by Mexican artist Leopoldo Mendez