The Taller Tupac Amaru is the art collective I'm a part of and which I co-founded with my best friend, Jesus Barraza,
who I met in college around 1996. I'm proud to announce one of the most
in-depth interviews to depth of our crew! We are getting major love
this year and busting out poster after poster. Although we are a small
group of three - Melanie Cervantes,
Jesus and myself - we are actively producing work in support of various
struggles around the country. Last month we had the honor to be named
as the Best of the Bay Artist Collective by the East Bay Express.
We been staying busy supporting the grassroots work in Arizona - a few weeks ago Melanie and Jesus helped organize a 12 hour print-a-thon in Los Angeles! In May, I helped produce two posters for the battle against SB 1070 and since June, have been staying occupied with a residency and some commissions. We hardly sleep!
We absolutely believe in the power of cooperative action so we are also a part of a national art collective - JustSeeds.org. Our two colleagues, Josh MacPhee and Icky, interviewed us for their inaugural issue of Signal
is a full color, 140 page book about international political art,
graphics, and culture. In their blog entry, they describe the reasons
for wanting to produce Signal: (read full entry)
We wanted to highlight current artists who we thought were doing
compelling work, and also to draw connections to the rich history of art
and culture associated with resistance and social movements. We
especially wanted to share some of the incredible graphics and cultural
documents we've seen from other struggles around the world, as most
North Americans suffer from a myopia about events taking place beyond
our borders.
This is by far one of the most thorough interviews of our collective
ever (we sat for like 3 hours talking). It even has some gossip facts
about quirky sides to our personalities and our history together, so be
sure to get your copy today. We also curse a lot! Click here to order
Here is one of my favorite lines from the interview. I am talking about the importance of mentoring young people of color:
I met a lot of the people who mentored me to be an
activist; they reached out to me when I was an early teenager. I was
really angry, and they helped me funnel my rage. It helped form my
political ideology to be a freedom fighter. There’s ways to inspire
people to do that. When I look back on this, I saw some men of color,
but I never saw women of color as freedom fighters. So when I go out and
talk, I’m looking to reach out to those young girls that are feeling
very insecure, or the system is telling them how ugly they are, all this
shit. My goal is to help them love themselves.
Some sneak peaks of the issue! (click for close ups)
Printmakers Rule! Click here to order
Cross-posted from Favi's blog.
Favianna Rodriguez is a celebrated printmaker and digital artist based in Oakland, California. Using high-contrast colors and vivid figures, her composites reflect literal and imaginative migration, global community, and interdependence. Whether her subjects are immigrant day laborers in the U.S., mothers of disappeared women in Juárez, Mexico, or her own abstract self portraits, Rodriguez brings new audiences into the art world by refocusing the cultural lens. Through her work we witness the changing U.S. metropolis and a new diaspora in the arts.
Hailed as "visionary" and "ubiquitous," Rodriguez is renown for her vibrant posters dealing with issues such as war, immigration, globalization, and social movements. By creating lasting popular symbols - where each work is the multiplicand and its location the multiplier - her work interposes private and public space, as the art viewer becomes the participant carrying art beyond the borders of the museum.
Rodriguez has lectured widely on the use of art in civic engagement and the work of artists who, like herself, are bridging the community and museum, the local and international. Rodriguez's has worked closely with artists in Mexico, Europe, and Japan, and her works appear in collections at Bellas Artes (Mexico City), The Glasgow Print Studio (Glasgow, Scotland), and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles).
Rodriguez has exhibited at Museo del Barrio (New York); de Young Museum (San Francisco); Mexican Fine Arts Center (Chicago); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco); Sol Gallery (Providence, RI); Huntington Museum and Galería Sin Fronteras (Austin, TX); and internationally at the House of Love & Dissent (Rome), Parco Museum (Tokyo), as well as in England, Belgium, and Mexico. She was a 2005 artist-in-residence at San Francisco's prestigious de Young Museum, a 2007-2008 artist-in-residence at Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, CA), and received a 2006 Sea Change Residency from the Gaea Foundation (Provincetown, MA). Rodriguez is recipient of a 2005 award from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.
As a teacher, Rodriguez has conducted workshops and presentations at Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles), El Faro de Oriente (Mexico), de Young Museum (San Francisco), the Habana Hip Hop Festival (Habana, Cuba), as well as Williams College and The Commonwealth Club. In 2003, she co-founded the Taller Tupac Amaru printing studio to foster resurgence in the screenprinting medium. She is co-founder of the EastSide Arts Alliance (ESAA) and Visual Element, both programs dedicated to training young artists in the tradition of muralism. She is additionally co-founder and president of Tumis Inc., a bilingual design studio helping to integrate art with emerging technologies.
Rodriguez is co-editor of Reproduce and Revolt! with internationally renowned stencil artist and art critic Josh MacPhee (Soft Skull Press, 2008). An unprecedented contribution to the Creative Commons, the 200-page book contains more than 600 bold, high-quality black and white illustrations for royalty-free creative use. Her artwork also appears in The Design of Dissent (Rockport Publishers, 2006), Peace Signs: The Anti-War Movement Illustrated (Edition Olms, 2004), and The Triumph of Our Communities: Four Decades of Mexican Art (Bilingual Review Press, 2005).
