Week 5 Chicana Printmaking

When thinking about printmaking as a medium for historically underrepresented artist groups like Chicana artists, I immediately thought of how printmaking relies on both presence and absence. Presence can be represented by the ink that is put on printing plates while absence is removed ink that helps create the image. Similarly, Chicana artists are both present in their rich history of printmaking, yet absent in many historical records or art institutions like museums. Printmaking is also heavily linked to mass communication through printing flyers, books, newspapers, zines, and other materials. Printmaking is associated with these communicative and politicized histories of mass media, such as through propaganda posters. For example, Yolanda M. Lopez’s Who’s The Illegal Alien, Pilgrim? references well-known Uncle Sam posters that were used to recruit citizens during the Vietnam war. Text and the ability to mass produce certain kinds of prints blurs the line between pure mass communication and printmaking in an art context. But when Chicana artists take advantage of these similarities to mass mediated printed material, such as bold/clear images and lines, there is a sense of directness in communicating their message to audience members. I am curious about the distinction between making printed art for select audiences vs. making mass-printed images as a form of protest art. Being able to produce multiple copies of a print is also useful in spreading political messages, and it differentiates Chicana printmaking from more precious processes like painting that only result in one copy. However, artists like Carmen Lomas Garza combine painting and printmaking in artist books.