Week 2: Revolutions

 

I found this article by Claudia E. Zapata to be incredibly interesting as it touched upon the digital aspects of Chicanx artists and art. Other classes I have taken have mentioned the earlier forms of art such as posters, calendars, murals, paintings, drawings, etc but they never went into depth about how artists and artwork evolved as the world became more technologically advanced. The article made the point that digital platforms assisted Chicanx artists to protest injustice, to improve education, and cultural reflection, and solidarity. One section of the article that made me wonder about technological advancements and political activism was Rupert Garcia and how they, “viewed digital strategies as part of a commercial practice, that it would corrupt the purity of fine art” (132). The article continued to state that Garcia quickly renounced doing hand-printing art, as they found it time-consuming, and embraced the digital way of producing artwork. 

Garcia’s reluctance of digital artwork then embracing it while renouncing handmade work made me wonder about handmade artwork as a whole within the Chicanx community and its political activism. Within political activism, did the rise of digital platforms completely demolish handmade artwork or did handmade artwork become the lesser-used model? If I had to make my own observation, I would say that the answer to my question has some grey areas to consider. Although I am not an artist, I don’t believe digital platforms demolished artwork by hand or that handmade art had completely ceased because there are artworks that are both digital and handmade - two small examples I can think of are pins/buttons and bookmarks. I am not certain of the prevalence of them during the beginnings of transformative artwork but today, they are excellent forms of political artwork that can be digital or handmade. While some works can solely be done digitally or by hand, there is still a middle area of the artwork that relies on both platforms and are just as effective.  

(Top bookmark - Front: Campaign Party with Mariachis. 1954. From the Chicano Studies Research Center Edward R. Roybal Papers.

Bottom bookmark - Front: Various record scans from the Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings.

Right and Left pins - pins from a Chicano club at Fullerton College in Fullerton, California.)