Three Latina Artists on the Power of Printmaking
Artists Nitza Tufiño, Luanda Lozano, and Julia Santos Solomon—all of whose work is featured in Matrix: Prints by Women Artists, 1960–1990—discuss the role printmaking plays in the Latino culture and its power to effect social change. Through conversation and demonstration with an etching press, learn about their artwork and their unique contributions to the birth and development of the vibrant Latino art scene. The discussion will be conducted in English and Spanish.
Of Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage, Nitza Tufiño was integral to the founding of Taller Boricua, the Puerto-Rican print workshop, and is the only female member of its Board of Directors. Founded in 1969, as a tool to make art accessible to the people and heal cultural wounds, its mission is educational, in service of social change and cultural heritage, supporting the development of “Nuyorican” artists’ personal style within a contemporary context. In 1973 she created her first public mural for the façade of El Museo del Barrio, now located on New York’s Museum Mile, of which she is a founder as an artist activist. Committed to public art, Tufiño also belongs to “El Consejo Grafico,” a national coalition of Latino printmaking workshops and individual printmakers.
Dominican-American Luanda Lozano is an artist and master printmaker who worked at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in the 1990’s, honing her skills by printing entire editions for herself and other Latin artists. In 2010 she co-founded Dominican York Proyecto GRAFICA, an important printmaking group that collaborated on critically acclaimed portfolios sought after by collectors and owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She serves as a Board Member of the Manhattan Graphics Center, where she was Vice President from 2015–2019. She finds the process and graphic qualities of aquatint, collagraph and etching most effective for her expressive purposes and her expertise as a printmaker has been significant in shaping artists’ experience in all of these settings.
Dominican-American artist Julia Santos Solomon has been creating paintings, sculpture, fashion design, and digital media for more than forty years, and printmaking has always been an integral part of her practice. Her body of multimedia work, which has been exhibited and collected nationally and abroad, speaks to the full range of one woman’s life experience coming out of the vibrant cultural heritage of the Caribbean. As a founding member of the Altos de Chavon School of Design in La Romana, Dominican Republic, and teacher of Fashion Illustration and Design at Parsons School of Design in New York, her vision has shaped generations of successful Latinx artists. Moreover, her experimental practice and fearlessness in finding ways, as a woman, to survive and thrive in the art world, reflect the feminist spirit behind the prints on view in Matrix. Her work is in permanent collections at the Latin Art Museum, Hudson River Museum, Indiana University Museum, Museo de Arte Moderno, and Altos de Chavon Foundation, as well as in archives at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art (including the Oral History Department), the Dominican Studies Institute at CUNY, and the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum.
This program is part of #HRMWomensHistoryMonth.
Support provided by Art Bridges.
