Part four of GRAPHIC LIBERATION: PERSPECTIVES ON IMAGE MAKING AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS

A critical conversation between Dignidad Rebelde (Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes) and Josh MacPhee, engaging question around the history of political graphics, the tension within aesthetics and social movements, a focus on poster making for local struggles, and the politics of representation. To register for this zoom discussion, click HERE.

Melanie Cervantes (Xicanx) and Jesus Barraza co-founded Dignidad Rebelde in 2007, a graphic arts collaboration that produces screen prints, political posters and multimedia projects which are grounded in Third World and Indigenous movements that build people’s power to transform the conditions of fragmentation, displacement, and loss of culture that result from histories of colonialism, patriarchy, genocide, and exploitation.

Melanie has exhibited extensively including at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco); Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco); National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago); and Museum of Modern Art (New York), among numerous others. In 2016, Cervantes received The Piri Thomas & Suzie Dodd Cultural Activist Award from Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice for her work with Dignidad Rebelde.

Jesus has exhibited at Galeria de la Raza (San Francisco); Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe); El Paso Museum of Art (El Paso); de Young Museum (San Francisco); Mexican Fine Arts Center (Chicago); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco); and internationally at the House of Love & Dissent (Rome); Parco Museum (Tokyo); and Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juarez (Mexico). He received the “Art is a Hammer” award in 2005 from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.

Organized by Josh MacPhee, the 2020/21 Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Art and Art History at Colgate University.

Graphic Liberation: Dignidad Rebelde is the 4th in a series of live conversations between Josh MacPhee, Colgate students, and distinguished political graphics producers, exploring the role of culture in social movements and the history and evolutionary usage of political graphics.

Josh MacPhee is a designer, artist, and archivist. He is a founding member of both the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, a decentralized group of political artists from the US, Canada, and Mexico, and Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements, based in Brooklyn, NY. MacPhee is the author and editor of numerous publications, including Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now and Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture.

Presented by the Art and Art History Department and the Christian A. Johnson Foundation. The Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Artist-in-Residence was established in 1986 as a challenge grant in support of the arts at Colgate. The residency program permits one or more artists or scholars in each of the areas of fine arts, music, and theater to become part of the Colgate community every academic year.

image: Jesus Barraza, “They Tried to Bury Us…,” screenprint, 2021>