Chicanx Art in The Digital Age

In Claudia Zapata’s essay, The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now, she includes an anecdote about Rupert Garcia’s hesitation to incorporate digital strategies into his work that begs the question: Do digital strategies diminish the purity of fine art?

As the digital age began, many artists wondered whether digital strategies would diminish the authenticity of fine art since everybody had access to view it and reproduce it. In the 1990s, Rupert Garcia contemplated whether the incorporation of digital tools into his creation of art would transform it into a "commercial practice" and "corrupt the purity of art" (6). Using Garcia's personal experience to respond to this question, the incorporation of digital strategies into the production of fine art reflects an artist's ability to adapt and an artist's dedication to social advocacy through artistic expression. An artist's willingness to explore the unprecedented digital possibilities that the digital age has to offer adds to the meaningfulness of their art because it truly reflects a form of self-exploration. 

    Digital strategies do not diminish the purity of fine art, instead they must be taken advantage of because through thousands of digitized channels artists can reach underserved communities that do not have traditional access to "fine art". Additionally, to say that digital strategies diminish the purity of fine art would be to suggest that there is a correct or incorrect way to create art and that is ultimately not true. Art has always been a reflection of the times in which it was created, therefore since we are living in a technologically advanced age, we must diversify the methods through which we create art. Even Rupert Garcia came to embrace the digital capabilities of technology, as seen through his Obama from Douglass portrait pictured above, because they allowed him to forgo the hardships of hand printing and create art more efficiently so that he can reach a wider audience with the same message he had been spreading since the 1960s.