In her essay, The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, Claudia Zapata provides a great analysis of how Chicano graphic artists and their fellow associates have used their work to express political viewpoints for the past fifty to sixty years. Technology played a big part in this revolutionary period. Artists using technology created art and protested through it and reached bigger audiences and their voices spread around even faster. This was the big advantage of technology. It can be accessible to anyone in a split second.
Starting from the 1960’s, Chicano activist-artists started the revolutionary printmaking movement that still is remembered and talked about today. The artists targeted many of the social problems like anti-war, feminist, and civil rights movements and turned the social activism into persuasive artistism that spread some new cultural ideologies among Chicanos in the United States. The activism started from the 60’s, but the digitalization took place in the 80’s. The Chicano artists were the first to use digital arts as a form of protest. Nowadays you could see many online protests and boycotts that come to huge successes, but little does anyone know it was started by the Chicanos.
An iconic picture in the book that I must refer to is the picture of the legend itself, Cesar Chavez, and Barbara Carasco( one of the Chicano digital artists who was part of this revolutionary movement) standing in the middle of Times Square in New York City in front of Carasco’s art piece about pesticides that was projected on the big screen. The piece was presented on July 31, 1989 in Times Square and was funded by the Public Art Fund. The art piece was meant to express the dangers of the harmful toxins in agribusiness. You can feel the power of the movement just by looking at this legendary picture.
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