Chicano Art
チカーノ・アート / 1965– / Style / Printmaking and Social Movements
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.
The narrative composition of the mural / Aztec and Catholic imagery placed side by side / Bilingual lettering / The strong flat colour of silkscreen
Dictionary entry
- 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
- Type
- Brush and blackletter-derived lettering drawn by hand, switching language mid-line without switching register.
- Composition
- A continuous mural band read left to right, the sacred figure held at the centre and the political detail worked into the edges.
- Material
- Flat silkscreen colour on cheap paper, or exterior paint on a wall: both made in numbers and put up in public.
- 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.
- Further study
- The posters of the United Farm Workers / The activity of Asco / Its connection to lowrider culture