Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
Carlos Cortez, a prolific Chicago printmaker, continued the political and cultural work of his immigrant parents by creating woodcut prints for the Industrial Workers of the World, an international labor union founded in Chicago in 1905 to which Cortez himself belonged for nearly 60 years. The first print, a poster for a 1984 show as part of the Chicago’s Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Caribbean, depicts four figures protesting against the arrival of American troops in their home countries. The second, made for the Chicago Mural Group — a collective founded in 1971 and responsible for hundreds of public artworks across the city — shows a woman painting a mural wherein the proximity between the muralist’s brush and the bayonet clutched by one of the figures in the background suggests the potency of art as a political weapon.