Poster of the Week

Support the U.F.W.A. International Boycott

Ricardo Favela

Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF)

Silkscreen, 1976

Sacramento, CA

2497

José Montoya, poet, muralist, printmaker, musician and teacher died last week at 81. He taught at California State University, Sacramento for 27 years and served as Poet Laureate of Sacramento from 2002 to 2004.  In 1969, José and other activists, artists, poets and students (including Esteban Villa, Juanishi Orosco, Ricardo Favela, Armando R. Cid, Eva Garcia, Lorraine García-Nakata, Juan Cervantes, and Joe Serna, Jr.) co-founded the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF).  Initially named Rebel Chicano Art Front, they changed their name in response to confusion caused by having the same initials as the Royal Canadian Air Force.  The RCAF was noted for their outrageous humor, and built upon the Royal Canadian Air Force connection by dressing as WWII pilots—as in the above poster of the week—and claiming to fly adobe airplanes.   

RCAF was one of the earliest and most influential of the Chicano art collectives.  Based in Sacramento, the RCAF advocated for Chicano civil rights and the United Farm Workers.  They often brought silkscreen equipment right into the fields, producing posters on site.

CSPG’s Poster of the Week was done by RCAF co-founder Ricardo Favela.  Four members of the RCAF, dressed in WWII bomber jackets, are doing creative boycotting in front of a Safeway Market, targeted by the United Farm Workers for selling non union grapes and lettuce.  After the photo was taken they accidentally entered a parade—where they won 2^nd prize for the best float!

The Center for the Study of Political Graphics is honored to have more than 60 RCAF silkscreens in the archive, and will continue to exhibit these powerful graphics to future generations.  José Montoya’s work will continue to inspire.

José Montoya

(1932-2013)

¡ PRESENTE !

To see an interview with José Montoya:

http://www.sacbee.com/2013/09/26/5771228/jose-montoya-sacramento-poet-and.html

Additional Sources:

http://library.csus.edu/content2.asp?pageID=668

http://blog.sfmoma.org/2013/09/jose-montoya-1932-2013-royal-chicano-air-force-founder/

http://www.kvie.org/programs/kvie/viewfinder/rcaf_flies_again/  

Poster of the Week

The Silver Dollar (Rubén Salazar)
Rupert García
Silkscreen, 1990
Berkeley, California

The Chicano Moratorium, formally known as the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, was a movement of Chicano anti-war activists that built a broad-based but fragile coalition of Mexican-American groups to organize opposition to the Viet Nam War. Led by activists from local colleges and members of the "Brown Berets", a group with roots in the high school student movement that staged walkouts in 1968, the coalition peaked with an August 29, 1970 march in East Los Angeles that drew an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 demonstrators.

Rubén Salazar was a well-known writer and journalist for KMEX-TV and the Los Angeles Times. After covering the Chicano moratorium march on August 29, Salazar and two friends stopped for a beer at the Silver Dollar Bar near Laguna Park. Police surrounded the place, allegedly looking for a man with a rifle, who had actually been caught hours before. Police threw a ten-inch tear-gas projectile into the bar attempting to make the occupants leave. The missile hit Salazar and killed him.

40 years later there are still many unanswered questions surrounding his death. Before dying Salazar had been working on a story that highlighted how local government seemed intent on ignoring all the complaints and violations involving police encounters with Mexican-Americans. No one was ever tried for his death, even though police admitted the tear-gas should not have been used in the incident.

In March 2010, the Los Angeles Times filed a California Public Records Act request for records of the shooting. On August 9, 2010, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca refused to release eight boxes of records regarding Salazar’s death. Three days later, in response to pressure from Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina and other county supervisor board members, Baca agreed to reconsider his position. At the time of this posting, no records have been released.

About the Artist: After serving in the Viet Nam War, Rupert Garcia became fully involved in the Chicano and other civil rights movements. He studied painting and printmaking at San Francisco State University, earning a B.A. (1968) and an M.A. (1970), and a second M.A. in the history of art from the University of California, Berkeley (1981). He produced silkscreen posters for the 1968 San Francisco State student strike and for the 1970 Chicano Moratorium. Garcia became an influential force as a silkscreen print and poster artist, combining contemporary art forms, the aesthetics and images from the mass media and consumer culture with an expression of social conscience. In 2000, he received the “Art is a Hammer Award” from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.

Poster of the Week

Las Drogas Causen la Juventud Perdida
by Malaquías Montoya

My other “voice” is the poster/mural. It is with this voice that I attempt to communicate, reach out and touch others, especially to that silent and often ignored populace of Chicano, Mexican and Central American working class, along with other disenfranchised people of the world. What better function for art at this time? A voice for the voiceless. My personal views on art and society were formed by my birth into that silent and voiceless humanity. Realizing later that it was not by choice that we remained mute but by a conscious effort on the part of those in power, I knew that my art could only be that of protest – a protest against what I felt to be a death sentence. We must not fall into the age-old cliché that the artist is always ahead of his/her time. No, it is most urgent that we be on time.

Artwork © 2008 Malaquías Montoya
www.malaquiasmontoya.com