Artwork details

Artist

Juan Sánchez

Title

Victoria de Samotracia (Afro-Taina)

Description

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

Date

2000

Medium

Mixed Media

Edition

Edition Various of 16

Signature

Signed

Image

68h x 43w inches

Sheet

68h x 43w cm

Status

Available

Price

Price on request

Juan Sánchez

Born in 1954 to immigrant working-class Puerto Rican parents in Brooklyn, New York, Juan Sánchez is one of the most significant Nuyorican visual artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Sánchez emerged as a central figure within a generation of artists using diverse media to explore ethnic, racial, and national identity as well as social justice in the 1980s and 90s. While Sánchez first gained recognition for his large multi-layered mixed-media collage paintings addressing issues of Puerto Rican identity and colonisation, his innovative oeuvre has expanded in terms of both medium and thematics; Sánchez now alludes to international subjects – including U.S. interventions abroad, apartheid, and nuclear disarmament – in addition to local and personal interests, through painting, photography, printmaking, and video.