Exhibition of Chicano Posters Previews Friday

More than 100 colorful graphic images, most of them posters, by 56 Chicana/o artists will be on display in the University Art Museum's new exhibition "Just Another Poster? Chicano Graphic Arts in California." Overseen by Marla Berns, museum director, the ironically titled project previews on Friday, Jan. 12, at 5 p.m. with a reception and a lecture by artist José Montoya. It will run until March 4 on campus.

"It's a really great show," said Berns. The exhibition is also more than a collection of provocative and powerful images.

A free symposium to explore the past and present state of Chicano graphic arts will open on Saturday, Jan. 13, at 2 p.m. with two panels discussing the visual messages and community-building aspects of posters. Moderated by UCLA associate professors Chon Noriega and Rafael Pérez-Torres, both panels will be held in the MultiCultural Center Theater.

An interdisciplinary team of scholars and curators spent five years of planning and effort on the "Just Another Poster?" exhibition, and it is not yet finished. A bilingual catalog is in the works, Berns noted.

While the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles supplied some posters, Berns reports that three-quarters of the exhibition came out of the Davidson Library's Special Collections-based CEMA, the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives.

CEMA is home to some 4,000 posters and extensive records from the art centers and cooperatives that produced much of the state's silk-screen poster art during the heyday of the Chicano visual arts movement of the 1960s and '70s, according to director Salvador Güereña.

"We're actually looking at a snapshot in the chronology of the Chicano movement," explained Güereña, "but it captures a broad range of enduring social and cultural issues." Immigration policies, border tensions, disenfranchisement, social visibility, and solidarity with developing nations are poster themes that speak to urban exiles searching for identity.

See the museum's Web site www.uam.ucsb.edu/index.html for hours of operation; CEMA's www.library.ucsb.edu/speccoll/cema/graphexh.html has details on the exhibition.