Graphic Art & Revolution – Opening Reception

_{Photographs by Margaret Randall and others (American, c, 1936). Published by Taller de Gráfica Experimental Nicaragua (founded 1980) for Asociación de Mujeres Nicaragüenses Luisa Amanda Espinoza (AMNLAE). Mujer Revolución, 19 July, 1981. Offset lithograph newspaper. Gift of John Ryder.}

Join us on November 8th from 4:00 – 6:30 PM for the opening of Graphic Art and Revolution: Latin American Political Posters 1968 – 2000  in the UNM Art Museum’s Clinton Adams Gallery. During the reception, from 5:30 – 6:30 PM, we invite you to attend presentations by Madeline Griffin, M.A. Candidate in Latin American Studies, University of New Mexico; and Brandon Morgan, PhD, Associate Dean, School of Liberal Arts at Central New Mexico Community College.

About the Exhibition:

Graphic Art and Revolution brings together Latin American political posters from two major repositories at the university: the University of New Mexico Art Museum and the Sam L. Slick Collection of Latin American and Iberian Posters at the Center for Southwest Research. This exhibition features materials produced in response to populist, anti-imperialist, and anti-dictatorial revolutionary and resistance movements from 1968 to 2000. Representing a range of nations and organizations, it includes prints created in Mexico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Cuba. It is organized into three sections that each focus on how graphic art has been employed as an agent and artifact of revolution: Inventing Revolutionary Icons, The Institutionalization of Revolution, and Global Solidarities.

About the Speakers:

Madeline Griffin, M.A. Candidate in Latin American Studies, UNM

Originally from East Tennessee, Madeline Griffin is an M.A. student in Latin American Studies pursuing a concentration in conflict, peace, and rights.  She is also a K-12 Cultural Education & Outreach Graduate Assistant at the Latin American & Iberian Institute. She has had the opportunity to tutor English, work in archives, international affairs, and various cultural institutions to complement her studies while at UNM. She holds an NCHC honors degree and B.A. from Emory & Henry College, where she majored in International Studies, History, and Hispanic Studies and worked as an International Education advisor. She loves the arts, reading, spending time outdoors, and working with English-language learners. Madeline hopes to use what she’s learned at UNM to continue developing resources and projects that extend inclusive, interdisciplinary thought, programming, and resources to the greater public.

Brandon Morgan, PhD

Landscapes of Revolution in Columbus, New Mexico, and Palomas, Chihuahua: 1893, 1908, 1916, and 1961

Scholars have long debated the end date of the Mexican Revolution, some placing it in 1920, others in 1940, and still others as an open-ended movement that has been in continuing evolution since the violence began in November of 1910. The revolution’s start date is rarely questioned. My research on the New Mexico-Chihuahua borderlands, detailed in Raid and Revolution (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), examines movements to resist the violence of the Porfiriato dating back to 1892. Although uprisings that targeted the Palomas customs house along the rural border failed to unseat Porfirio Díaz, they laid the groundwork for later revolutionary movements.

In this presentation, I outline attacks on the Palomas customs house in 1893 and 1908 that revealed the weaknesses of the pax porfiriana, as well as the connections between Pancho Villa and the twin communities of Palomas and Columbus that provide important context on his raid on the New Mexico border town in 1916. By the early 1960s, the landscapes of Columbus had fully been subsumed by Villa’s actions when dignitaries from both nations dedicated Pancho Villa State Park as a site geared to remake the memory of the violence of the Mexican Revolution.

Dr. Brandon Morgan is Associate Dean for History, Latin American Studies, American Studies, Native American Studies, and Communication at Central New Mexico Community College (CNM), where he has taught since the fall of 2009. Between 2016 and the present, he worked on building CNM’s Latin American Studies associate’s degree program through a partnership with UNM’s Latin American and Iberian Institute. That partnership included CNM’s first ever Study Abroad program to Antigua, Guatemala in 2018, with a second program to Antigua in 2023 and another in Mexico City in 2024. His book, Raid and Reconciliation: Pancho Villa, Modernization, and Violence in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, was published with the University of Nebraska Press in August 2024.