Alum Rupert Garcia Noted for Using Graphic Design for Political Protest

HYPER ALLERGIC -- As this collaboration suggests, the flowering of grassroots social movements in California in the 1960s and ’70s led to concurrent flourishing of graphic innovation as a form of collective action. In an era when mass dissemination still required printing acumen, progressive print shops put themselves at risk to publish radical outlets, while artists and designers set up workshops to produce large runs of inexpensive posters. The examples are too numerous to list. In Los Angeles, designer Sheila de Bretteville, a co-founder of the Woman’s Building, oversaw a center where women learned letterpress, offset lithography and other technologies that would allow them to find their own voices in print. Chicano artists Malaquias Montoya and Rupert García taught hundreds of student activists at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State College respectively to screenprint, creating a flurry of energetic and often anonymous graphics that animated the anti-Vietnam War and Chicano civil rights movements.