The Art of Protest
Wednesday December 31, 1969 | SF Bay Area
By Felicia R. Martinez
Talía Herrera didn’t consider herself an artist when she designed her first protest poster.
An immigrant from central Mexico, Herrera enjoyed drawing as a pastime but had never worked with materials other than pencil and paper. Looking at her first silk screen, though, one would never know it. The poster’s central figure is a woman looking through a chicken wire fence at her child. The text states: “La separación no era el sueño/Separation was not the dream.”
Herrera created the poster as part of a workshop designed by the San Francisco Print Collective, a multiracial artist group that formed in 2000 to support anti-gentrification work that teaches about three silk screening workshops for activists every year. Last year, its members created a Spanish-language workshop for community members working on anti-gentrification issues with the groups People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights and St. Peter’s Housing Committee.
We think it’s strategic as artists and activists to do our work in partnership with organizations that are doing campaigns, raising community consciousness [and] doing leadership development,” said Fernando Martí,
one of the collective’s members. “We see art-making as part of that work.”
This approach to political art is not unprecedented, of course. The collective likes to cite the Black Panthers and France’s student strikes of 1968 as their models, since those were movements in which artists and organizers forged intentional relationships to benefit the political work at hand.
In San Francisco, the collective continues in this tradition by creating posters for campaigns on gentrification and land usage. Their projects have ranged from banner-making and mural painting to an installation piece that consisted of an interactive community map inviting people to imagine what they wanted to see in their neighborhoods and to place models of those things directly onto the map. The collective is best known for its posters creating support for campaigns, as well as the silk-screening workshops. Martí, himself, first became involved with the collective through one of the workshops.
At a presentation Herrera gave in a Mission District venue where her poster was on display, she explained that when generating ideas for her poster, she reflected on her own children and what it would be like to be separated from them. She had been upset hearing about the ICE raids taking place in communities throughout the Bay Area just weeks before the silk-screening class began.
With a little computer training and some technical support with Adobe Photoshop, Herrera produced a first draft of her image. She took a copy home and hung it on her refrigerator door. “My son,” said the mother of two, “who is 4 years old, he saw it, and it made him sad…He said, ‘Why is it that the child is on one side of the fence and the mother on the other side?’ I told him that the child was at school and that his mother was saying hi to him…But every time he saw it, his face changed and became sad.” Her son’s reaction encouraged Herrera. “I said, if a little child can capture the feeling, I think then [the poster] could probably reflect the message that I wanted to express.”
Mariana Viturro, one of the instructors, noted that workshop participants are not only excited to see their visions come to life in the printmaking process, but they also gain an awareness of visual messaging that they had not otherwise accessed in other political education trainings.
“One student came back to class one day and was talking about an ad that he saw on the street and what was compelling about it—the color, the text.” Through the process of studying campaigns, messaging and what makes a powerful poster, said Viturro, “the students become more conscious of what takes up their visual space.”
So by the time their own posters are ready, students are aware of how their own projects could alter the politics of the city’s visual space.
“When we finished [the class], there was a demonstration confronting the raids,” Herrera said. “They asked me if I wanted to take my posters to the march. I said of course, because it’s good that they get shown and they’re not just stored. It feels good that my work was useful.” Even though Herrera wasn’t able to attend the demonstration, protesters carried her message through the streets for the public to see.
Based on the success of this project, the collective is exploring the possibility of training staff members of organizations to start their own silk-screening workshops for their members. The challenge, of course, is that nonprofit staff are already spread thin, and teaching poster-making is not within the purview of their regular workload.
The passion of community members, though, might change that. Herrera acknowledged that she doesn’t have the resources to produce more posters on her own, but she’d jump at the chance to take another workshop in the future. She motioned towards a copy of her poster displayed at the offices of St. Peter’s Housing Committee: “When I pass by my poster, I get even more excited that it hasn’t been forgotten.”
Felicia Martinez recently completed an MFA at Mills College in Oakland, CA. Find her online at rockeras-sin-fronteras.blogspot.com.
Read more at colorlines magazine.