Graphic Art and Revolution: One Woman’s Experience

^{Photograph by Margaret Randall, Three women carrying wash stop and face the camera in Tipitapa, Nicaragua, 1979.}

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. The 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. The exhibition 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 Speaker:

Poet, photographer, translator, and social activist Margaret Randall was born in New York City and grew up in New Mexico. Taking active part in the Mexican student movement of 1968 and then living in Cuba for eleven years and Nicaragua for four, Randall returned to the United States in 1984, only to face deportation when the government declared her writings “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” With the support of many, she won her case in 1989. Randall is the author of more than two hundred books, including Che on My Mind, Artists in My Life, and I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary. Recent titles include Luck, Home, and This Honest Land. She’s received the Poet of Two Hemispheres award from Poesía en Paralelo, Ecuador, AWP’s George Garrett Award, Albuquerque’s Creative Bravo Award, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of New Mexico, among other recognitions.