Archive for the ‘Radical Art News’ Category:
Cuban 5 Art Exhibit
News:
Cuban 5 Art Exhibit Opens at La Peña Cultural Center
“From My Altitude,” a touring exhibit of 25 paintings by Antonio Guerrero, one of the five men facing stiff sentences in U.S. prisons for spying, opened at La Peña Cultural Center Aug. 6 and will continue through the end of the month.
Although hailed as heroes in their own country, most Americans know little—if anything—about the Cuban 5. The Cuban government asserts they were gathering information to protect Cuba from right-wing terrorists, not conspiring to commit a crime against the United States, as alleged.
Guerrero, Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, René González and Fernando González were arrested in 1998 in Miami and convicted three years later of being unregistered foreign agents.
The Associated Press reported that three of them were also found guilty of espionage for failed efforts to get military secrets from the U.S. Southern Command headquarters. The AP also reported that Hernández was convicted of a conspiracy to murder four Miami-based pilots who died when their planes were shot down on Feb. 24, 1996, by a Cuban MiG in international waters off Cuba’s northern coast.
Facing sentences that span from 15 years to life, all five have been working with their lawyers and international human rights advocates to draw attention to their situation.
Hernández and René González have been involved in lengthy visitation rights battles over the U.S. government’s refusal, on at least nine occasions, to grant visas to Hernández’ wife Adrianna Perez and René González’ wife Olga Salanueva to visit their husbands.
Labañino and Guerrero have been serving life sentences and Fernando González was sentenced to 19 years. A federal appeals court ruled their sentences were too long last year and ordered new sentences for all three. They are scheduled to be re-sentenced in October.
The paintings Guerrero produced in the isolation of his cell in Florence Colorado Penitentiary include portraits of the prisoners’ mothers, wives and children, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and familiar landscapes from Cuba.
“Even Nelson Mandela, who endured 27 years of hard labor in prison on Robben Island under apartheid South Africa, was still allowed to see his wife,” said Alicia Jrapko, national coordinator for the International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban 5, the event organizer. “How is it that the U.S., which promotes itself as the champion of human rights, can be more punitive and cruel than apartheid South Africa when it comes to visitation rights for Olga and Adrianna?”
Drawing comparisons between the problems that existed in Cuba and the City of Richmond, a sister city to Regla, Cuba, Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin stressed the importance of creating more awareness about the issue.
“The mainstream press has dissed Richmond in the same way it has dissed Cuba,” said McLaughlin, who will be leading a delegation to Regla in November to meet with the families of the five men. The Richmond-Regla Sister City Association co-sponsored the exhibit at La Peña. “We know that the way to overcome hardship is to link in unity,” said McLaughlin, who last visited Cuba in 1986. “Richmond is making an effort to build a sustainable city—empowerment is the way forward. The Cuban people have made a revolution and are living it.”
McLaughlin’s efforts to pass a resolution in the Richmond City Council calling for the freedom of the Cuban 5 and their visitation rights were successful.
A five-minute video clip from the documentary Against the Silence: The Family of the Five Speak Out, by New York filmmakers Sally O’Brien and Jennifer Wager, showed Adrianna recalling how the news of her husband’s arrest changed the course of their marriage.
She talked about sporadic phone conversations with Gerardo, during which only he was allowed to call her for a few minutes from the prison. Most of the five men’s children have grown up without their fathers, and some of them have not seen each other in 11 years.
“I have traveled all over the world talking to lawyers,” said Adrianna, who is trying to raise awareness of the case. “Sadly, American people do not know.”
The International Committee is planning to hold a series of gatherings this year featuring Nobel laureates, artists, actors and activists who will call on President Barack Obama to end the U.S. blockade to Cuba and support the cause of freedom for the Cuban 5.
Local political analyst and author Michael Parenti, who is a member of the International Commission for the Rights of Family Visits, denounced the American government’s harsh treatment toward the Cuban 5.
“Here are five exceptionally intelligent, sensitive, admirable, dedicated, and democratically minded men who committed no act of espionage or sabotage against the U.S. government,” Parenti said. “For their valiant efforts against the terrorists they have been given draconian sentences.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker also spoke in support of the five men.
“What has happened to them is shameful,” Walker told the Daily Planet before taking the podium. “For those of us who believe our country is for justice, it’s shameful. These men have left behind their wives and their children. Their only fault is trying to protect their country. The least we can do in this country is to speak up against the injustice and express our concern and affection for these people in the prison.”
Walker, who lives in the Bay Area, has supported the Cuban revolution since she was 15 years old.
“Injustice is the greatest foundation of hatred and this is what we continue to create, and we do it as if we don’t understand this,” Walker told the audience. “We understand this, but we keep harming people deliberately, making them suffer. Our government does this, our country does this over and over through the centuries. So what can our future be if we mistreat people in this way?”
Walker said the painting she had been touched by the most was the one Guerrero made of the cell door he saw every day.
She later read aloud from Letters of Love and Hope, a book chronicling the correspondence between the Cuban 5 and their families, for which she has written a prologue.
“Time is short,” Walker said. “Does it mean anything to be an American if you can actually send these men to dungeons, not let them see their families, not let them embrace their children, or their wives? … I think of how much I love the people that I love and how much I love snuggling with them, how much I love cuddling, and how much I love to feel them in the morning, to feel their touch. To take this away from human beings—just on a whim—is actually heartbreaking.”
“From My Altitude” will be exhibited at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave., through August. For more information visit www.thecuban5.org or www.laPeña.org
Upcoming Art Exhibitions: Featuring Art from General Strike Comics
August 7th / 5-9pm / Trinity on Main, 69 Main Street / New Britain, CT
August 22nd / 5-9pm / 250 Lafayette st. / New York
Join us and other artists/activists for a night of art and music. General Strike Comics artist Christopher Hutchinson will be displaying new work along with many others.
Click on the picture below to check out ArtandStruggle.com
They Want You to Perfume the Sewers
Whenever I hear or read about mural programs designed to prevent graffiti and beautify cities, I am reminded of this amazing speech. It was delivered, via video, to the 1988 Alliance for Cultural Democracy Conference in San Francisco. - ma*
THEY WANT YOU TO
PERFUME THE SEWERS
Meridel Le Sueur
I bring greetings from the Middle West and also from Time. On February 22, I’ll be 88 years old. I’ve been a writer, an artist in the Middle West, trying to find out what the true image is of our time and our country.
I believe that now is the most wonderful period of my life because for the first time we can think of a global world: a global world of art, a global world of expression, a global audience, a global people. Global was not a word in my time that you even spoke about. It wasn’t in your consciousness to be global. Today the consciousness, the rising of the global people, is so wonderful, so tremendous. Such energy is released and we are released as artists from servitude to the establishment, to the death force of imperialism.
Engels said in 1877 there were only two subjects for the artist, for the creator. One was the moribund dying society, ‘the corpse’ he called it. The other was the newborn, being born out of the corpse, the new people, the new consciousness, the young child, the image of humanism.
Now we see this actually happening. It’s no longer a theory to say “the rising of the working class ” as we used to say in 1916 in the First World War. It seemed like a dream. Today you look at your television in the evening and you see the people rising. You see the children throwing rocks at the army; you see the brutal resistance of the dying class, ‘the corpse’ as Engels said.
Imperialism is dying. I don’t think they have any way of even saving themselves. They’re committing suicide by cutting off the food, causing famines, exporting our products to other countries and selling them back to us. It would be like an Alice in Wonderland death if it wasn’t so horrible.
I don’t belittle the dangers of the bomb at all, but even these dangers very often bring us together in unity, in a global unity and certainly in a consciousness of the dangers. We see now that we didn’t even dream of the viciousness, of the deadliness, of the willingness to risk complete global and cosmic death; of the capitalist class. The middle class is also falling down into the working class and betraying its interests. They have too much to protect to move against death. Death is the only product of imperialism today. It’s an obvious problem. They tell us they are going to kill us, and they do kill us.
So the artist has a great wonder and a tremendous influx of new life and at the same time has a great responsibility, because he must bring his skills to the rising people who contain the creation of the new world. It no longer exists in the middle class. It no longer is any good to get the grants. They just want you to perfume the sewers. They need artists to bring perfume to the terrible stench of their death. It isn’t doing the artist any good. There is no place to go except to the struggle of the people today. There is no place for the artist. There is no artist arising except from the struggle of the people.
We see now that all culture comes from the people, comes from the struggle of the people. In America, middle-class culture has obscured the great vigor of American people’s culture. I came up from the farm culture. When I was young there was farm music, the farm songs, a great culture of the Midwest farm and the democratic forces in the Middle West, and radical organizations like the IWW.
The IWW is something for you to look at because, there, culture was part. It wasn’t separate. It was something you just brought out. Culture was part of the struggle. You could only be a poet or an artist if you were a worker, a revolutionary. The IWW taught me that culture is part of the struggle of the people. It’s not separate. They never had a meeting they didn’t open with poetry. They painted. They had cartoons. Their culture was immense, but more than that, it was a culture of the people. I once saw a group of IWWs learning poetry, learning Walt Whitman, in preparation for going to prison because they didn’t have books, so they learned poetry. When going to the same prison they each would learn a different poem so they could bring their culture to prison.
Culture was part—it created a tremendous audience. In 1913, John Reed worked on a tremendous production in Madison Square Garden, put on by the strikers of Patterson. We used to put on affairs here from the farm. We had music, poetry, books. There is a tremendous culture, which is almost unknown and is now in danger of disappearing, like the black culture, like the ethnic cultures of the Norwegians and the Scandinavians.
This is coming up in our culture like a Vesuvian release of energy and its just beginning. Recently in the Austin strike, there was a wonderful example of the artists emerging out of the struggle. They’ve had a mural, which the reactionaries destroyed.* They had wonderful music. They had theater that just came out of the struggle. This is where it comes from. Go where it is. Go there. That’s the only place there’s life. That’s the only place where there are any kind of images.
The new images are coming from these struggles. The farm struggle recently here, for example, was one of the greatest uprisings of culture in the Middle West. The grief, the tragedy, the images… People, farmers, committed suicide. They were looking for images of their struggle: seeing their struggle as a long history, for the first time, as inevitable.
In the thirties, the workers and farmers saw that the factories would open up again, saw that there would be again prosperity even. Today, they know there is not going to be a “good” war. They know the factories are not going to reopen. The work has been exported to cheap labor in foreign countries. The steelworkers know as they are struggling and struggling to open those mills. The worker knows that there is going to be no “good” war. That there is no prosperity. That there is not going to be an end to exploitation. This in itself is a great cultural vision, a vision that is true, a vision that is possible. It is not only possible, it is necessary; it is the only continuation of the struggle of man to exist.
So I feel wonderful for you young people. It’s a wonderful thing to be here now, stripping some of the illusions of bourgeois culture—the illusions of getting into those galleries, the illusion of becoming a prostitute to bourgeois culture. It’s not possible anymore, except maybe for a few. The grants are being cut off. They’re not going to give out these grants anymore. They didn’t work. You didn’t come in and perfume the sewers. And thank God, we’re not going to have those kinds of grants anymore.
What we need now is something like the WPA where a democratic culture can be supported, and a democratic audience. One of the great things about the WPA was its raising of the audiences’ consciousness. There was an audience for art; there was an audience for murals. We started here a farm collective, a painters’ group for the farmers to paint during the winter and have farm exhibits, this is where your audience is. The middle class is not a rich audience anymore. They don’t have the images anymore. They don’t have the truth.
The hearings (Iran-Contra) were the greatest thing to show you what the middle class does to support the lie. Culture is used to support the lie, to cover the lie. Language is used to cover the lie. In those hearings, language became a tool to cover not only lying, but the death and destruction of our whole society.
So this is what is happening. It’s revealed. It’s not a secret any longer. They can’t keep it a secret. What those bastards do in the morning is on TV in the evening. It’s impossible to be secretive. They tell upon each other, in fact. They can’t keep a secret from each other. You are living in a time when the front door is open, the road is open.
You don’t even hardly have to choose—it’s between life or death. It’s between what supports creative culture and what is death to it. It isn’t even a choice. It’s inevitable. It’s just there. You have to live it. You have to be it. You have a chance to become part of this struggle. As the Communist Manifesto ends; the only people who will save the world are those who have nothing to lose but their chains.
This is what we see in the colonial countries. People driven to hunger, to death, who literally have nothing to lose, who really rise up on the horizon on all scenes. Those great meetings are not any longer the little meetings, but the meetings of millions of people demanding life, demanding the image, the true image. So this is what you have now for your life; to go into this great life, this great new force.
We used to say, “Workers of the World, Unite.” Well now we have no choice. It’s inevitable. They have to unite or die. So it’s not a dream any longer. It’s not a hope any longer. It’s a presence, a wonderful living presence.
I’d just like to read a piece of mine that I wrote years ago, and this I hope would be the keystone in the temple of your meeting together:
Let us all return.
It is the people who give birth to us, to all culture, who by their labors create all material and spiritual values.
No art can develop until it perpetuates and penetrates deeply into the life of the people.
The source of American culture lies in the historic movement of our people, and the artist must become voice, messenger, organizer, a wakener, sparking the inflammable silence, reflection back to the courage and the beauty. He must return really to the people, partisan and alive, with warmth, abundance, excess, confidence: without reservations, being cold and merely reasonable; or craftiness, writing one thing, and believing another; not being a superior person, even superior in knowledge, in theoretical knowledge, an ideological giant, but bereft of heart and humanity.
Capitalism is a world of ruins, junk piles of machines, men, women, piles of dust, floods, erosions, masks to cover rapacity.
To these stinging sounds the people carry their young, in the shades of their grief, in the thin shadow of their hunger, hope and crops in their grief, in the dark of the machine, only they have the future in them.
Only they.
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Speech presented to the Alliance for Cultural Democracy conference in San Francisco, 1988
A remarkable writer and life-long agitator, the biography of Meridel Le Sueur can be found at http://www.mnhs.org/library/findaids/00323.xml
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Link to this article on Google documents: http://docs.google.com/View?id=ddrcgb43_23g482p8t6
*P-9 Mural Dedication/ 1986. Mural by striking meat packers - Local P-9. Dedicated to then-imprisoned “terrorist” Nelson Mandela. Destroyed by UFCW union bureaucrats. (Organized by Mike Alewitz and Denny Mealy.)
Live Wire
Live Wire
C.J. LaPointe
From the IWW to the present art in our revolutionary movement has played an important role in keeping our traditions alive and vibrant. Posters, murals, banners comic strips, etc. are all part of the aesthetic that brings our traditions to life and helps propagate our ideas.
Live Wire, a political comic strip found on Andy’s Art blog is a significant example of how art can be used to illustrate a narrative that helps us to understand labor struggles, immigration, war, and economic crisis.
We follow Marisol, a character in Live Wire, as she takes us from teacher sit-ins to the struggle in Gaza. Never one to shy away from exposing the role of U.S. imperialism, Andy seamlessly ties story lines together making the connections between the attack on workers at home and abroad.
More than just criticism, Live Wire offers us ways to confront the behemoth that is capitalism. Education, strikes, and workers control of industry are all offered as solutions.
A thrilling narrative is met with tight illustrations that portray the average worker who can rise to extraordinary heights when we act collectively with our brothers and sisters.
You will have to go back to archived posts to get the entire story of Live Wire, minimal effort for a worthwhile read. You can view Andy’s Art at www.andycomix.blogspot.com
Has it come to jail time to wipe out graffiti?
Every time we turn on the television, look toward billboards in the sky, or open a magazine, we are bombarded with the art of the capitalist media. It is an aspect of our cultural life that can not be ignored. Yet when working class youth try to find their cultural voice in a society that is ever more alienating they are labled as criminals. Notice how a quote fraom the officer in the article below compares a graffiti writer to a dog lifting its leg.
Has it come to jail time to wipe out graffiti?
Like the city of San Francisco, North Beach resident Micki Jones is fighting a losing battle against graffiti.
“I paint it over and it is usually tagged again in 48 hours,” said Jones, who covers up graffiti on her home and other buildings on her block. “It used to be weeks, but now those guys are out there every night.”
When it comes to symbolic statements about a city, nothing speaks louder than the painted scrawls on walls. They say a neighborhood is either unwilling, or unable, to stop vandalism. Graffiti infuriates homeowners, degrades streets and undercuts civil pride.
And yet it happens over and over in San Francisco and has for years. How is that possible? The answers range from the economic downturn (less enforcement), to a lack of consequences (offenders aren’t taken seriously in the courts), to simple fatigue (why paint over the tags when they are back the next day?)
This isn’t a minor problem. The “broken window” theory continues to prove to be true. The theory says each broken window or graffiti tag is a test to see if anyone cares enough to fix it. San Francisco is failing the test.
“As soon as the first tag goes up all bets are off,” said Christopher Putz, the city’s graffiti abatement officer. “It’s like a dog lifting its leg. After the first one does it, every other dog has to tinkle there, too.”
Mohammed Nuru, deputy director of operations for the Department of Public Works, often hears from angry residents at community meetings, but it’s those who have given up on fighting graffiti that he remembers best.
“It is very hard to see some 75- or 80-year-old lady almost in tears because someone has vandalized her house and she can’t do anything about it,” Nuru said.
Public frustration has grown since a 2004 law made property owners responsible for cleaning up graffiti in 30 days or face a fine that could reach $500. Owners complained that it made the victims pay for the crime. Others said that the city ran out of money to pay attorneys to enforce the ordinance.
That’s not to say nothing is being done. Putz said that arrests are up this year and are likely to surpass 2008’s record total of 234. Complaints to the city’s 311 hot line have increased dramatically. And on April 23 the Graffiti Advisory Board - a 25-member group that includes residents, business leaders and city officials - will host a community meeting at the Hilton on Kearny Street to discuss new ways to fight the problem.
Still, it’s hard to disagree with Jones, who has been painting over graffiti in North Beach for 19 years.
“This is a beautiful city,” Jones said, “and it is getting trashed.”
Nuru, who lives in Bayview-Hunters Point, was incensed last week when a freeway sign near the entrance to his neighborhood was rendered unreadable by taggers.
“I totally lost it,” he said. “What I am suspecting is that the vandals are moving more in groups now. We have seen patterns of taggers going in groups to deface property.”
Putz, who has worked with graffiti abatement for over five years, doesn’t necessarily think there are more taggers nowadays. But he is frustrated with the lack of consequences for those who are caught literally red-handed.
“I’ve had kids tell me that they wouldn’t try it in Daly City because that’s San Mateo County and they are treated pretty harshly by the courts,” Putz said.
That’s seconded by Officer Troy Courtney, who was the city’s graffiti expert for seven years. Asked why some other cities, like Seattle, don’t seem to have much tagging, Courtney is blunt.
“You know why?” he asked. “Because in Seattle the first time you get caught you spend six months in jail.”
San Francisco taggers are more likely to get off with community service or probation. That’s a problem because, as is the case with other quality-of-life crimes, a small minority is causing a majority of the problems.
Putz has pushed for a single San Francisco judge to be assigned all graffiti cases so he or she could get familiar with the offenders. But, he said, “nobody wants to be the graffiti judge.”
And finally, there is a school of thought that believes this is art, not a public nuisance. Courtney said taggers come from all over the world to take photos of the San Francisco graffiti murals celebrated on Internet sites and in books.
“It’s like collecting baseball cards,” Courtney said.
For residents like Jones, that’s going to be tough to sell.
“I don’t care if you are Michelangelo,” she said. “If you don’t have permission to write on my building, don’t do it.”
Via:www.sfgate.com
The Mural as Mirror: Reflections on the Immigrant Experience - Open Studio
| March through April, take advantage of the opportunity to watch and engage with artists Carlos Hernandez Chavez and Marela Zacarias as they create murals in our large gallery that illuminate their own unique experiences of immigration and their intimate knowledge of the struggles and challenges of the immigrant community of Hartford in 2009. Then, on April 30, join us as we unveil these powerful works.Made possible with a grant from the Edward C & Ann T Roberts Foundation
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Friday, March 20, 2009 at 9:00am
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| End Time: |
Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 4:00pm
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| Location: |
Charter Oak Cultural Center
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| Street: |
21 Charter Oak Ave
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Hartford, CT
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8602491207
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Move Over Phantom of the Opera
China plans a Karl Marx musical |
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A Chinese director is planning to stage a musical based on the founding text of communism, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. The plot will revolve around a group of office employees who find out they are being exploited by their boss. China’s communist leaders still praise Karl Marx, although they now shy away from his economic theories. But those involved in the production say that Marx is still relevant today, particularly in a world gripped by an economic crisis. Good timing There will be singing and dancing in this stage version of the classic communist treatise, which is due to open in Shanghai next year. “We will bring [Marx's] economic theories to life in a trendy, interesting and educational play, which will be fun to watch,” director He Nian told the state-run China Daily. Those behind the project say this approach will help people understand what many consider a dry, philosophical text. But the producers promise they will not trivialise Marx’s central message. To make sure that does not happen, Zhang Jun, an economics professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, will act as an advisor on the production. “It seems good timing to do the play when the global economic crisis has become a key phrase in people’s lives,” he said. There are those who will wonder what relevance Marx has in modern China, whose leaders are more likely to talk about the free flow of capital rather than its corrosive affects. And no place epitomises this approach more than the modern, capitalist city of Shanghai. But director He said the money-driven city was a perfect place to stage the production, particularly now, with global capitalism coming under fire. “Whenever I have dinner with friends who work in offices, they talk about budget cuts and employee layoffs,” he said. |
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Street Theater with Iraq Veterans Against the War
To contact IVAW’s Connecticut chapter, you can call:
Jeff Bartos 860-866-8197
Shoot, Coward. You Are Only Killing A Man
Shoot, Coward. You Are Only Killing A Man
By Christopher Hutchinson
A Review of Che: A Graphic Biography
Written and Illustrated by Spain Rodriguez
Edited by Paul Buhle
From an asthmatic but adventurous boy to an international symbol for revolution, the story of Ernesto “Che” Guevara is one that has moved oppressed people all over the world to the struggle against imperialism.
My eyes first opened as a young activist and university student reading Che’s, On Socialism and Man. My admiration for Che’s idea’s and the Cuban revolution has never waned. For the past few months an important book has been making its way around the world being published in many languages and recently I was fortunate to have been sent a copy of Che: A Graphic Biography published in October 2008.
This graphic biography created by legendary underground comic artist Spain Rodriguez truly channels the selfless revolutionary life of Che. In some ways it feels like a superhero comic book and it is hard to believe that one person could make such a significant impact. However, Che is far from the lone moralistic Ayn Rand type superhero that seems ubiquitous in the comic book world. With Che it is the power of the collective that helps him as he battles the capitalist ideology.
Rodriguez gets deep into the story of Guevara and seems to have internalized the details. From growing up in Argentina to his life as a revolutionary the book finally culminates with Guevara’s murder in Bolivia by CIA trained soldiers in 1967. The story refuses to end without mentioning how Guevara’s example has inspired the masses of working people all over Latin America.
The revolution in Cuba has always been threatened by U.S. capitalism and the island’s resilience seems inconceivable when considering its size. Rodriguez’s artwork is overflowing with scenes from a revolution that organized a society based on the needs of all people instead of the profits of a few. From page to page the reader is actively engaged in learning not only how the struggle developed but how Che came to develop his understanding of imperialism.
As a young doctor Ernesto Guevara sets out across South America on a road trip where he witnesses the horrific role that U.S. corporations play in subjugating the workers and peasants of South America. This adventure eventually leads him through the C.I.A. backed coup of the Jacob Arbenz Guzmán government in Guatemala and finally to Mexico where he meets Fidel Castro and the Cuban July 26th movement that would become the group of insurgents who would take that fateful voyage on the Granma to their eventual guerilla camps in the Sierra Maestra.
This book unlike the popular movie, The Motorcycle Diaries that also chronicles this period of Guevara’s life, has the ability to go in depth and make clear the revolutionaries transition from Ernesto to Che. In other words, Guevara goes from a partial observer to an active partisan in the struggle against capitalism. This was a time when the Spanish interjection “che” would come to be synonymous with revolution.
When someone makes the decision to become a revolutionary based on their convictions fight for the liberation of humankind it is a profound transition. When Marxism is the weapon we use to understand the system that we are struggling against it is then possible, as we have seen in the case of Che, to deal a great many strikes to the capitalist class.
In an afterword to Che: A Graphic Biography, Sarah Seidman and Editor Paul Buhle write, “Che lived by his own ideal of the “new man,” the modern human being freed from the oppression of the class system, who was ready to love, live and if necessary die for emancipation of humanity.”
As youth around the world struggle with the current economic crisis and see first hand the contradictions of capitalism this book will be more than just beautiful illustrations of a time no longer relevant. Instead, they will find that it embodies the revolutionary who, in spirit, marches with us defiantly through the streets all over the world. It is safe to say that future generations who pick up this book will have a better understanding of what it means to be a socialist revolutionary.
An Injury to One is an Injury to All! The Art of Marela Zacarias
An Injury to One is an Injury to All! The Art of Marela Zacarias
By Christopher Hutchinson
In 2006 the oppressed masses of immigrant workers, citizens and undocumented, stepped out of the shadows and mobilized in the millions from Los Angeles to Connecticut to oppose the passing of anti-immigrant legislation.
Since then the federal government with the cooperation of state government has increased the brutal repression of immigrant workers all over the country. Work place raids and home invasions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have become common in many areas of the country. While fear and uncertainty are palpable amongst the immigrant population, so too is a culture of resistance that will not sit idly by while their friends and family members are arrested and deported.
The recent artwork of Marela Zacarias has brought the plight of immigrant workers to the gallery walls. As the economic crisis deepens it seems that most gallery exhibitions are disconnected from reality as viewers wander aimlessly amongst artwork that only passively whispers into their ear.
Zacarias’s installation art is anything but passive. It reaches out, grabs the viewer and pulls them in closer to witness the contradictions of a nation that is supposed to be at the center of the so called “free world”. Her art holds even more meaning as she has been a leader in the struggle for immigrant rights.
She says, “This series of paintings are about how the immigrant rights movement has been “frozen” by ICE and about the fear of deportation in which immigrants live their daily lives.”
She paints images in a way reminiscent of photomontage art and composes each piece by layering painted walls with painted Plexiglas utilizing a very limited palette of blue, black, red, and white.
When asked, Zacarias singled out her painting Watershed to make the connection between the workers struggles of the past and how it is inseparable from the struggle of today’s immigrant workers. In the painting she references images from a mural that was created by Mike Alewtiz along with P-9 unionists at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota while on strike in the mid 1980’s.
She said that the painting, “Is about the principle, an injury to one is an injury to all. This painting describes a moment in history when the workers at the Hormel plant in Minnesota went on strike because the plant wanted to reduce their wages. The union local P9, after a very inspiring fight, lost the strike, which gave the meat plant owner’s room to decrease pay and benefits. Eventually the plants started hiring immigrant workers who would work under horrible conditions and very little pay. Now these same workers are terrified of the raids, giving even more room to the plant owners to exploit its workers. Only by making sure that ALL workers have rights, we will be able to win better conditions in the work place.”
Images from meatpacking plants that were hardest hit by ICE raids are woven between the tears of mothers separated from their children by the menacing Gestapo like ICE agents.
Courageous stories of immigrant workers hiding from ICE agents in vats of blood to escape deportation so that they could remain with their families helped inspire this series. There is no room for wavering, once you view the paintings you must choose a side.
The art demands to know, “Are you with the masses of workers, who through their labor have built the cities and harvested the fields that create wealth for the U. S. elite or do you, take the side of the bosses who underpay and abuse their workers with long work days and threats of deportation?”
The paintings are more like vignettes taken from larger murals. Zacarias wields her art as a weapon and attacks the ruling elite of the capitalist system with a stroke of the brush. This is in sharp contrast to most art that hangs cold and isolated from the outside world.
It should come as no surprise that Zacarias is also a renowned muralist. She has painted murals with themes of social justice in many places from Washington, D.C. to Mexico City.
You can view more of her work at www.Marela.org.