PRIDE AND POSTERS

Hip-hop bard Chuck D famously likened rap music to CNN, but well before rap, visual artists were putting out the news on the street. “Just Another Poster? Chicano Graphic Arts in California” at UCLA’s Fowler Museum celebrates a Latino art form--and urban news bulletin--rooted in the Chicano movement that blossomed in the 1960s.

Activism prompted many of the show’s more than 100, mostly silk-screened prints dating from the mid-’60s through the present. A 1965 work, “Huelga!” by Andrew Zermeno, displays the black eagle shaped by an inverted Aztec pyramid that came to symbolize the United Farm Workers campaign. A 1976 design by Louie “The Foot” Gonzalez urges a boycott of the Gallo and Coors liquor companies for allegedly discriminatory hiring practices. Poster art “keyed into the major political issues of the times,” says co-curator Chon Noriega, an associate professor in UCLA’s film and television department.

Posters also publicized cultural events such as plays and punk rock concerts. Images of pachucos, lowriders and the Virgin of Guadalupe could represent themes personal to the artist or emblematize ethnic identity. Displayed on telephone poles, walls and in other urban spaces, posters were a way of reaching the community when Latinos were a scant presence in newspapers and television. “It reflected a need within the Chicano civil rights movement,” Noriega says. “The need was the ability to communicate.”

Printed largely at Latino art centers around California and mostly drawn from archives at UC Santa Barbara, the works vividly recall a community’s history. “It is very important for audiences in Southern California to see Chicano prints,” says Tomas Benitez, executive director of Self-Help Graphics, the East L.A. art center that produced many of the show’s prints. “It helps people to understand who the hell we are.”

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“just another poster? chicano graphic arts in california,” at ucla’s fowler museum of cultural history through dec. 9. Park in lot 4. open wednesday through sunday, noon to 5 p.m., thursday, noon to 8 p.m.; (310) 825-4361.