“The poster allows me to awaken consciousness, to reveal reality and to actively work to transform it. What better function for art?”

– Malaquías Montoya

Latin American Posters: Public Aesthetics and Mass Politics traces four decades of Latin American social and political history during a time of widespread crisis and unrest. It is based on the nearly ten-thousand-strong Sam L. Slick Collection of Latin American and Iberian Posters, housed in the University of New Mexico Libraries, Center for Southwest Research, and augmented by a selection of complementary images by United States artists from the permanent collection of the National Hispanic Cultural Center. Divided into five broad-ranging themes, the exhibition documents radical political, social, and artistic movements whose concerns are as relevant today as in their time.

The early 1950s saw the emergence of Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara onto the world stage. The triumphant Cuban Revolution helped ignite radicalism throughout the region and drew pressure from American foreign policy-makers, beginning with the Kennedy administration. A gathering militancy in Latin America engaged a wide spectrum of political parties and grassroots organizations, students and intellectuals, peasants and urban workers struggling together for social and economic reforms and a more egalitarian political system. The gains, capped by revolutions in Chile, Peru, and Nicaragua, were short-lived, blocked or defeated. What followed in the successive three decades—the principal period covered in this exhibition—was the development of radical politics of the Left in Latin America, met by the effective conservative countermeasures, often repressive, of the Right.

Dating from the late 1950s to 2005, the posters originate from thirteen Latin American countries and the United States, with the majority produced in Chile, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. The exhibition includes works by such well-known artists as Raúl Martínez, René Mederos Pazos, and Eduardo Muñoz Bachs of Cuba, Jesús Ruiz Durand of Peru, Antonio Martorell, Lorenzo Homar, and Rafael Tufiño of Puerto Rico, and Rupert García and Ester Hernández of the United States.

As a popular art form, the poster was reinvented in Latin America during the mid-twentieth century. As such, the restless 1960s are now difficult to imagine without the Latin American poster, which helped to inaugurate a new historical epoch on which both the countercultural and the post-colonial left a strong imprint. The political and cultural posters presented here, from early silkscreen works to the brash images of the 1970s, document the period vividly and irrefutably. Their simplicity and directness makes them powerful instruments for announcing the mood of the moment, transmitting messages, and mobilizing mass action. Taken together, they skillfully illustrate not only the history of what happened but the ideology of what was, and is, possible.

Latin American Posters: Public Aesthetics and Mass Politics was organized by UNAM University Libraries' Center for Southwest Research, Albuquerque, New Mexico in collaboration with the National Cultural Center. Support for this exhibition was provided by the University of New Mexico Center for Regional Studies.