Imaging Aztlan: Printmakers From Chicago’s Mexican
By Bertha Husband
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Andreu has assembled 33 very different artists spanning three generations in the service of this national remembering. But to what extent does his curatorial approach reflect the concerns of the individual artists? Andreu sets out to establish in the first two prints, executed in the 1940s and now in the Art Institute’s collection, what he sees as the art’s political and historical antecedents. The artists, Alfredo Zalce and Leopoldo Mendez, were founding members of the Taller de Grafica Popular (Popular Graphics Workshop) in Mexico City in 1937, and showed their work in Chicago in the 40s.
Of the contemporary Chicago artists in this exhibition, it is Carlos Cortez who truly belongs to this tradition of political agitation, a tradition that started long before Mendez, at the turn of the century, in the period leading up to the Mexican revolution. The best-known artist of that era of political broadsheets and newspaper illustration was Jose Guadalupe Posada, and in a sense his ghost hovers over a number of the artists here, of whom Cortez is only the most political. His woodcut De la tierra somos, no somos ilegales! (“We Are of the Earth, We Are Not Illegal!”) illustrates better than any other print here the political concept of “Aztlan”–Cortez opposes the designation of illegality in one’s own land. The work is made up of portraits of three Mexicans–a man, a woman, and a child–in front of a pyramid and an ear of corn. According to Andreu’s catalog essay, one argument that the midwest was once the home of the Aztecs is that the Cahokia mounds in southern Illinois resemble the pyramids of Teotihuacan, Mexico. The ear of corn no doubt refers to the pre-Columbian religious significance of corn.
One wonders what Alfonso Lopez Monreal’s print is doing in this exhibit. His work generally is full of assimilations and quotations from art that is not Mexican, and he’s said, “Nationalism has nothing to do with my work. Nonetheless, I have to respond to the realities of the place where I come from.” He is represented here by the only example I know among his prints that directly quotes Mexican culture. The title of Las Dos Juanas refers to an old woman, a veteran of the Mexican revolution, whom the artist used to see on the streets of Zacatecas when he was growing up. Juana appears twice in the print, on either side of the artist, shown working at his easel. There is also a small quote from Posada, a tiny calavera dressed as a mariachi musician with a guitar. Lopez Monreal, who lives in Ireland, has no connection with Chicago beyond the fact that he’s exhibited here a couple of times (and this print is from a private collection in Chicago). Maybe the reason he’s in an exhibition of “Printmakers from Chicago’s Mexican Community” is nostalgia. Andreu states in his essay that “Aztlan is in the heart. It is a place where one belongs, home.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo / Jose Andreu.
