Jesus Barraza

Visiting Dates
November 2, 2010 - November 5, 2010

Jesús Barraza was an RCAH Artist in Conversation from November 2-5 to coincide with MSU's Día de los Muertos programs.

Jesús Barraza is an activist printmaker based in San Leandro, California. Using bold colors and high contrast images, his prints reflect both his local and global community and their resistance in a struggle to create a new world. Barraza has worked closely with numerous community organizations to create prints that visualize struggles for immigration rights, housing, education, and international solidarity. In 1998 Barraza was a co-founder of ten12, a collective of digital artists. He has also worked as graphic designer for the Mission Cultural Center/Mission Grafica, where Calixto Robles, Juan R. Fuentes, and Michael Roman mentored Barraza in various screen printing methods. In 2003, he co-founded the Taller Tupac Amaru printing studio to foster resurgence in the screenprinting medium, where he completed more than 100 prints. Additionally he is a partner at Tumis Inc., a bilingual design studio helping to integrate art with emerging technologies.

Printmaking has allowed Barraza to produce relevant images that can be put back into the hands of his community and spread throughout the world. He believes that through this work and the work of Dignidad Rebelde, he is playing a role in keeping the history of graphic art activism alive.

Barraza has exhibited at Galeria de la Raza (San Francisco), Museo del Barrio (New York), de Young Museum (San Francisco); Mexican Fine Arts Center (Chicago), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), House of Love and Dissent (Rome), Parco Museum (Tokyo), and throughout Mexico. He was a 2005 artist-in-residence with Juan R. Fuentes at San Francisco’s prestigious de Young Museum and was a recipient of the “Art is a Hammer” award in 2005 from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.

 

Links:
Jesus Barraza