Taller de Gráfica Popular (Mexico City, Mexico)

Organizational History

Mexico’s foremost political printshop, the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP, Popular Graphic Arts Workshop) has an important place in Mexico’s long history of printmaking in the service of social change. This tradition is largely credited to the seminal work of Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) who was a printmaker and social critic during the Mexican Revolution. The TGP coalesced as an organization in 1937 after the collapse of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR, Revolutionary Writers’ and Artists’ League) founded three years earlier.

The Taller was a vibrant collective of established and emerging artists committed to the direct use of visual art in the service of social change. The Taller became a magnet in the international progressive design community, and several U.S. artists (such as Elizabeth Catlett, Pablo O’Higgins, and Mariana Yampolsky) produced work there. Within ten years, similar workshops had sprung up in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and New York. Links with the United States ran deep throughout the TGP’s history, and included commercial contract work, shows (the TGP exhibited in the U.S. at least 73 times between 1936 and 1965), artist exchanges, and conferences. Some of the classic struggles that played out in the TGP included the role of individual artists in a collective setting, consequences of alliances with political factions, and the relationship of market art to free public work.

Their medium of choice was monochrome relief prints – linoleum prints, woodcuts, and lithographs. Only occasional multicolor images appear, as do screenprints, engravings, and other print techniques. Prints were generally single sheet items, although some works are quite large for this medium (35 x 90 cm) and were designed to be pasted together into two-sheet posters. Artists in the TGP created work in a wide variety of formats, including posters, fine art prints, "volantes” (handbills, 34x23 centimeter prints on thin colored paper), portfolio editions (most of which were produced as fundraisers), banners, "wall newspapers,” and book illustrations. The subject matter includes land reform, class struggle, progressive electoral candidates, anti-war and anti-imperialist movements, solidarity with other countries, folklife, labor and trade unions, Mexican revolutionary history and heroes, and other progressive causes.

The preeminent published source on the TGP is Helga Prignitz’s El Taller de Gráfica Popular en México 1937-1977 (Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico, 1992, UC Berkeley library NE544.6.T34 P754), but material in English is hard to come by. Of note are two excellent recent unpublished doctoral dissertations – Alison McClean’s "El Taller de Grafica Popular: Printmaking and Politics in Mexico and Beyond, from the Popular Front to the Cuban Revolution” (University of Essex, 2000, UC Berkeley library NE544.6.T34 M3 2000a \f\) and Susan Valerie Richards’ "Imagining the Political: El Taller de Grafica Popular in Mexico, 1937-1949” (University of New Mexico, 2001, UC Berkeley library NE544.6 T34 R5 2001a). Other significant collections in the West include the University of New Mexico’s Center for Southwest Research and Stanford Library’s Special Collections.

From the guide to the Taller de Gráfica Popular collection, 1935-1995, bulk 1953-1958, (The Bancroft Library)