Chicano Art vs OSPAAAL Poster
チカーノ・アート / OSPAAAL連帯ポスター
Both sit in Printmaking and Social Movements, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. 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.
OSPAAAL Poster
Carries transnational solidarity with anti-colonial liberation movements through flat color, photography, iconography and short multilingual text.
| Chicano Art | OSPAAAL Poster | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1965– | 1966–1990s |
| Family | Printmaking and Social Movements | Printmaking and Social Movements |
| 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 | Blazing flat color / Multiple languages / Symbolic iconography / International solidarity |
| 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 | Single sheets calling for international solidarity that must read in several languages at once. · Campaign material condensing a distant event into one image people can carry. |
| Type | Hand drawn brush script or blackletter for headings, English and Spanish at the same size | Arrange three languages around one image without shrinking any of them. |
| Composition | The sacred figure at the centre, with people and labour running around it as a band | One central symbol on a flat color ground, with no quiet margin left. |
| Material | Four screens at most, outlines on a black plate, printed cheap for paper or wall | Few screen colors, thin paper, folded flat enough to travel by post. |
| 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. | Do not consume revolutionary aesthetics as decoration, and name whose solidarity with which movement appeared in which medium. Stacking too many symbols keeps the meaning from reaching a distant reader at a glance. |