4:00 PM Dialog & Presentation (OPEN TO ALL)
6:00 PM Hands on Poster Making Workshop
(Space is limited-RSVP at studentsinformingnow.wordpress.com)
For more information or accommodations email elcentro@ucsc.edu or call 831/459-2427.
Presented by: Students Informing Now
Sponsors: El Centro-Chicano Latino Resource Center, Art Department, Cantú Queer Center, Women's Center, and Kresge College Programs Office
Art can play a critical role in the communication of ideas, thoughts and political agenda. The current negative dialog on immigrant and queer rights can be disrupted through art. Art activists Favianna Rodriguez and Julio Salgado have been invited to present their art, interventions and community activism as a means of exploring new political paradigms. Rodriguez and Salgado will provide a lecture, followed by a hands-on workshop on poster making with a purpose. Students will engage in a practice of engaging a politic through visual arts.
“Art is uniquely able to speak to our understanding of the world by delivering potent, powerful and empathetic content. People engage with art in a very different way than they engage with a policy paper or a news article or even a protest. This is why I believe in the power of art to shape thoughts, change hearts, and ultimately help shape laws and policy. Art has the potential to distill the most complex social challenges down to their most basic and simplest values. Values like love, family, caring for the other, caring for those in need, and fighting the things that cause human suffering."-Favianna Rodriguez
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.
JULIO SALGADO is a gay Mexican-born artist who grew up in Long Beach. Through the use of art Salgado has become a well-known activist within the Dream Act movement. Salgado uses his art to empower undocumented and queer people by telling their story and putting a human face to the issue. He has worked on various art projects that address anti immigrant discourse, the issues of what it means to be undocumented, and what it means to be
undocu-queer. His most recent art project was a series of satire images addressing American Apparel’s use of a farm worker in one of their ads in the summer of 2011. Julio consistently stepped up to the plate and shared stories that reflect the strength of the immigrant community. During 2012 Julio’s work related to every issue from deportation to domestic worker rights to cultural appropriation. Julio is diligent and critical with his interventions in new media and arts.
