Chicano Art vs Mexican Muralism
チカーノ・アート / メキシコ壁画運動
Chicano Art comes from Printmaking and Social Movements and Mexican Muralism from Mural Traditions. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Chicano Art
An expression born out of the Mexican American civil rights movement. Murals, silkscreened posters, lowriders and lettering form one continuous vocabulary, and Aztec imagery, Catholic devotional figures and mixed English-Spanish lettering share a single surface. A case in which a movement produced a style.
Mexican Muralism
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Paints post-revolutionary history, labor, indigenous culture and visions of the future onto the vast walls of public buildings.
| Chicano Art | Mexican Muralism | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1965– | 1920s–1940s |
| Family | Printmaking and Social Movements | Mural Traditions |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | The narrative composition of the mural / Aztec and Catholic imagery placed side by side / Bilingual lettering / The strong flat colour of silkscreen | Monumental murals / Crowds of figures / Political narrative / Public space |
| Best used for | Organising and campaign graphics that have to belong to the people they address and be producible by them · Bilingual identity and signage in which code-switching is designed rather than reduced to a translated second line | School and civic walls where local history must be read by people passing. · Exhibitions on labor or migration needing crowds of figures to show relationships. |
| Type | Hand drawn brush script or blackletter for headings, English and Spanish at the same size | Keep lettering inside banners and flags, painted with the same brush as the image. |
| Composition | The sacred figure at the centre, with people and labour running around it as a band | Set the subject high for an upward view, running the crowd as one wave. |
| Material | Four screens at most, outlines on a black plate, printed cheap for paper or wall | Fresco on lime plaster with earth pigments, the wall texture left visible. |
| Caution | Lifting the lettering and the saints as decoration: the imagery belongs to a specific movement and community, and taken away from that it reads as costume. | Borrowing crowds and raised fists without deciding whose history is told and for whom yields a large decorative wall with no argument. |