[Author]Compiled by the
El Reportero’s staff[/Author]
Serigrafía, a traveling exhibition featuring 30 influential silkscreen prints created by the best of California’s Latino/a printmaking community,
The exhibition features poster art from the 1970s to the present, including works of Bay Area artists Juan R. Fuentes, Jos Sances, Favianna Rodríguez, Esther Hernández, Yolanda López and other California artists.
Emerging in concert with the civil rights movement and activism for political and social justice for marginalized groups, these prints confront political, economic, social, and cultural issues on both a personal and a global level.
The art, which explores such subjects as the United States embargo on Cuba, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement, was conceived to provoke, protest, and praise.
From the iconic Sun Maid by Esther Hernández, who combined the familiar Sun Maid girl with the calavera (the satirically costumed skeletons) to bring awareness about the use of pesticides, fungicides, and other toxic chemicals in raisin production, to works by emerging printmakers like Gilda Posada, whose print Libertad was created to show the relationship between liberation movements for human rights in Palestine and in Mexico, this exhibition is varied in subject matter but rooted in a long heritage of California printmaking.
Many graphic artists called on the iconography of their pre-Columbian past, such as in Xavier Villamontes’ Boycott Grapes, which depicts a powerful Aztec warrior crushing handfuls of grapes that drip with the blood of exploited and injured farmworkers. When strikes, marches, and legislation failed to improve conditions in the fields, through posters like this one, the United Farms Workers Union (UFWA) asked the public to boycott grapes, wine, and lettuce in order to pressure growers.
Will be on view in the San Francisco Main Library’s Jewett Gallery, July 26 – Sept. 7, 2014. Opening discussion with curators Juan R. Fuentes and Jos Sances.
Related events:
Voice on Ink/Voz en Tinta, poetry event with San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murgía August 7, 6:30 p.m., Main Library, Latino Hispanic Community Room.
SF Symphony performs annual free outdoor concerts at the Stern Grove Festival
The annual San Francisco Symphony free outdoor concerts return to the Stern Grove Festival Sunday, July 6 and San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza Sunday, July 27 as part of the Orchestra’s Summer & the Symphony concert series,
These annual free community concerts are a perfect opportunity to bring a picnic lunch and spend a Sunday afternoon listening to the San Francisco Symphony with friends and family, enjoying great music in the beautiful settings of two of San Francisco’s most treasured outdoor spaces.
On Sunday, July 6 at 2 pm, the Orchestra returns to the Stern Grove Festival for its annual free concert in the Sigmund Stern Grove, a beautiful outdoor amphitheater located at 19th Avenue and Sloat Boulevard in San Francisco. Guest soloist, Japanese pianist Makoto Ozone, performs with the SFS improvising on Ravel’s well-known classical pieces Bolero and Pavane pour une infant défunte. The concert includes musically diverse styles from the jazz of Leonard Bernstein and Henry Mancini, to Richard Rodgers’ Broadway sound, to music by American composers Morton Gould, Raymond Scott, and Howard Hanson.
On Sunday, July 27 at 2 pm, the SF Symphony performs at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza following the Orchestra’s wildly successful 100th Anniversary Celebration there in the fall of 2011. Violinist Benjamin Beilman takes center stage in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Opus 64 and the Orchestra performs additional short classical pieces by Tchaikovsky and Mozart. Food and beverage vendors from Off the Grid, booths and free giveaways add to the festivities.
