In “Policia! Mira como trabajan tus impuestos cabron!” (“Police! Look How Your Taxes Work, Bastard!”), one of Carlos Cortez’s black-and-white woodcuts that hang in the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum as part of its permanent collection, a woman nurses an infant as she’s being arrested by two skulls wearing dark visors and helmets. In the more benign “Ars lunga, pito breve, sin safos No se mueve!” (“Art Lives Long, Penis Short, Without Feeling It Doesn’t Work!”)–a self-portrait of Cortez smiling as he sketches his wife, Marianna–skeletons lurk in the background.
With a hand-lettered card,
That mix has a parallel in his own family. “I have a Mexican Indian Wobbly father and a German socialist, pacifist mother. My father had been a traveling delegate for the Industrial Workers of the World, and he happened to be in front of a socialist meeting peddling one of the IWW’s English-language periodicals, Industrial Solidarity. My mother was coming to this meeting with a colleague of hers, who immediately started berating my father for peddling his stuff in front of one of their meetings. My mother said, ‘No, he has a right to promote his ideology every bit as much as we do.’
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Cortez later became an accomplished oil and acrylic painter, though he continues to prefer the woodcuts. “I love to paint, but the relief graphics mean much more to me. When you do a painting that’s it, it’s one of a kind. But when you do a graphic the amount of prints you can make from it is infinite. I made a provision in my estate, for whoever will take care of my blocks, that if any of my graphic works are selling for high prices immediate copies should be made to keep the price down.”
Cortez’s work always fills one wall of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, 1852 W. 19th; hours are 10 to 5 Tuesday through Sunday, and admission is free; call 738-1503. Some of his work is also up at Okee-chee’s Wild Horse Gallery, 5337 N. Clark, through July 31; hours are 12 to 6:30 Tuesday through Friday and 10 to 6 Saturday. Cortez will read from his poetry at the gallery this Friday, July 23, from 7 to 10 PM; admission is free; call 271-5883.
