Printmaking Through Chicago

In this article, I discuss Chicago printmaking through artists, portfolios, and studios based in the city, together with their international collaborations and transgenerational influences. The transnational linkages represented in Chicago by Carlos Cortéz, his peers, and his students are characteristics shared by many Latines in the challenges they face and the solidarities they channel. I frame the aesthetic and decolonial power of Latinx prints in and through Chicago in terms of these artists’ ability to (1) make arresting and easily disseminated political art to address contemporary social matters and (re)interpret their history, (2) carve their own identity, and (3) elaborate new forms of citizenship. The result is the simultaneous creation of and dialogue with Latinx subjectivities. In other words, engaging with ideological and aesthetic Mexican and Chicano traditions, the prints produce Latinx images that reflect those collective identities constituted by lived realities in the diaspora and undergirded by geopolitical and intersectional solidarity. Meditating on experiences and struggles associated with disenfranchised groups while eschewing the idea of a monolithic Latinx experience, the prints represent unique cultural productions. They articulate a democratic engagement that challenges repressive and ideological state and corporate apparatuses supported by sexism, racism, xenophobia, worker mistreatment, and police brutality. This multifaced oppression forges various collective identities that compel resilience.