From Library Journal
This publication, which accompanies a touring exhibition organized by the University Art Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sources the remarkable holdings of the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA), a permanent program of the university's Davidson Library. The book explores the profound role art played as a part of the Chicano movement in California and the effectiveness of the poster medium itself. The exhibition of 56 artists' works looks at Chicano graphic art since the 1960s, initially created as part of the Chicano civil rights movement. In these posters, which usually announce events or promote specific causes, artists try to recapture Mexican heritage and create Chicano identity, often using images and words from both their native and their adopted culture. The diversity of approach shows in the form and styles of the work itself, which ranges from silkscreen to digital and from traditional to postmodern pastiche. Over 30 color plates, a catalog of the exhibition, and an appendix about printmaking processes round out the text. As contributor George Lipsitz so aptly describes it: "The production of posters was not so much community-based art making as it was art-based community making." Recommended for large public libraries, academic libraries, and specialized art or Hispanic collections. Sylvia Andrews, Indiana State Lib., Indianapolis
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
Just Another Poster? investigates the critical role posters and other graphic materials played in the Chicano struggle for self-determination in California, from the borderland of San Diego to the urban metropolis of San Francisco. This volume of essays by an interdisciplinary group of scholars and curators represents the first comprehensive study of the ways the poster, as a medium of expression largely relegated to the margins of art world display, distribution, and critical reception, has been a primary form of cultural expression within Chicano communities in California and across America.
