Details — Click to read
Collagraph/Photolitho/Feathers/Handcoloring
68”h x 43”w
Edition Various of 16 2000
Sanchez’s work has long been close to my heart (even
though it often speaks a language that isn’t mine) because
of its combination of indigenous mythologies, daily experience
and political resistance. Like art and politics, oil and water,
these elements are said not to mix. Nevertheless, a marvelous
rainbow results – not a slick, but an arc of connections, moving
from the barrio to the homeland, spanning distance and hard times.
Like Sue Coe, Sanchez gets away with outspoken radicalism in art
contexts, trampling taboos against overt political statement with
his Puerto Rican nationalist calls to action. But where Coe’s
strategy is an aggressive insistence on violence against the innocent,
Sanchez is hopeful. He sees down the mean streets to a rich and
colorful future. In 1985 he wrote for the catalogue of a show at
SUNY Stony Brook: “Political art is a medium used as a weapon to
hopefully recapture or regain the positive energy of celebration – to
regain the goodness of humanity.”
Lucy R. Lippard Coming to Life essay from Juan Sanchez
Rican/Structed Convictions at Exit Art New York City 1989
