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Goldman 16

Chicano artist Rupert García's monumental pastel diptych of the [[underline]]Brothers Flores[[/underline]] [[left-margin]](Fig.6)[[/left-margin]] [[underline]]Magón[[/underline]] is taken from a well-known historical photograph which was also the basis [[left-margin]](Fig.7)[[/left-margin]] for a recreated characterization of the two brothers in Jesús Salvador Treviño's 1972 film [[underline]]Yo Soy Chicano[[/underline]] (I am a Chicano).  Like many Chicanos, García and Treviño (Californians who came out of the political and artistic movement generated in the 1960s by the U.S. civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements, and the farm workers' strikes led by César Chávez) consider the history of militant Mexican organizers and artists part of their tradition.  García follows the example of Siqueiros to the degree that he adapts his works from documentary photographs; however he is wholly contemporary in his style which is a combination of vanguard graphic techniques drawn from 1960s Pop Art (which also based itself on photography) and that of the Cuban poster movement.  Starting as a silkscreen poster artist during the student uprisings in San Francisco and Berkeley, he developed a technique of flat, high-contrast shapes with unmodulated tonal changes in the brilliant colors that characterized the Cuban movement, but are also present in Mexican colorism.  Both color and the use of Spanish words in a poster's text affirm García's Mexican heritage.  Employing single portrait figures in close-up, like Andy Warhol and Chuck Close, García - unlike these artists - is always concerned with militant content.  His pastels add large scale and rich texture to the themes he previously executed in serigraphy, and he moves back and forth between the two media depending on whether he wishes a single work, or needs multiples for a political cause.
In simulated historical sequences on the Flores Magón brothers, Treviño used an animation technique he calls "kinaesthetics", in which two or three frames of a photo are shown in rapid sequence, followed by another sequence of a different photo.  Applying these techniques to the actors who played the Flores Magón brothers, he produced images experienced as historical photographs in action.