Chicano Arts Pioneer Takes On Globalization and War (tags)
Pioneering Chicano artist Malaquias Montoya was present at the creation of the Chicano rights movement in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, being one of the organizers of the Mexican American Liberation Arts Front (MALAF) who helped create the images of that movement. But he’s also involved with current social and political controversies. In his show “Globalization and War: The Aftermath,” through March 4 at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park, he takes on Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, the U.S. government’s rationalization of torture (“softening them up for interrogation”), the growing gap between rich and poor in the U.S. and throughout the world, and other progressive themes in a bold, assertive and often brutal style derived from 20th century New York artist Ben Shahn and the Mexican muralists Orozco and Siquieros.
A Meanness in This World (tags)
The January 8 shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and murder of federal judge John Roll and five other people in Tucson, Arizona has been blamed on a lone nut, and both wings of the corporate media — center-Right and far-Right — have fallen over each other to absolve the ultra-Rightists of talk radio, Fox News and the Tea Party of blame for the alleged shooter’s actions. Nonsense. Not only did Sarah Palin’s Web page specifically “target” Congressmember Giffords for defeat last April — a piece of hysterical rhetoric Giffords called Palin out on at the time — but the radical Right’s incessant propaganda on talk radio and Fox News, with its ceaseless calls not only to defeat but “eliminate” its “enemies,” created a national climate that ensured that the killer’s madness took the form it did and his delusions led him to attack two individuals that had already been the targets of radical-Right bullying and harassment.