A laser-sharp political awareness doesn’t flourish in a vacuum and studying at the Workshop for People’s Art had exposed Sue Coe to the poster art and library sources that fueled her imagination.  If the likes of Rembrandt, Goya, and Kathe Kollwitz filled her nascent eyes, expressionist Otto Dix and social muralist Jose Clemente Orozco heightened it further.  She visited prisons, AIDS wards, even slaughterhouses to peel the layers of her vision clean. 

Xavier Viramontes is a nationally renowned printmaker whose prints impacted many political movements and social justice campaigns during the 1970s. His prints are also part of the revolutionary canon of Chicano art produced at Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco. His most famous print, “Boycott Grapes, Support the United Farm Workers Union” from 1973, which depicts an Aztec warrior smashing grapes with his fists as the grape juice and blood drip over the title, is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.  He spoke with Edgardo Cervano-Soto about his career and art.