Art and Autocracy in the Americas- Artist spotlight Amy Kaslow Gallery

ART AND AUTOCRACY IN THE AMERICAS ARTIST SPOTLIGHT  JUANA ESTRADA HERNÁNDEZ AND FRANCISCO LETELIER

Francisco Letelier, Flower Power, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 40 in Chilean-American muralist Francisco Letelier comes by his passion for human rights honestly. Son of the prominent and dominant activist against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Francisco was just 17 years old and a junior at Bethesda’s Walt Whitman high school when his father was blown up by a car bomb as he and his colleagues were driving around Sheridan Circle. Chile’s Secret Police ordered the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier, the longtime colleague of democratically-elected President Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in a coup led by General Pinochet.  Living in Washington, DC, where many top Chilean emigres fled Pinochet’s wrath, Orlando Letelier helped lead the resistance. A brilliant economist, foreign minister, defense minister, and ambassador, Letelier had earlier suffered a year of torture in Pinochet’s notorious Dawson Island concentration camp until the US and others pressured for his release. A year after the bombing, his son Francisco Letelier joined other artists to paint a commemorative mural in Rock Creek Park. For son Francisco, the years that followed were filled with pursuing charges against Pinochet, publicly sharing the danger of the man who ordered his father’s killing, and challenging authoritarianism everywhere.    As a muralist painting private and public spaces across the country and around the world, Letelier universalizes struggle against autocracy and for justice. His work includes a portrait of his father along with other other freedom fighters, from local leaders to Martin Luther King, Jr. More recent pieces relate to the very essence of today’s world: youth chafing against aggressive authority. Letelier’s difficult subjects are beautified by his fascination with natural imagery. Delicate Queen Anne’s Lace flowers and fireflies superimposed over a work; the bottom of a disturbing scene brightened with red poppies and an ear of corn beg the question, why?    See Flower Power, for example. It shows students protesting during the 2021 uprising in Chile, a time when the president was diffident to public health urgencies and refused to believe people needed protection from Covid-19. The public took to the streets, blaming bad governance for allowing many thousands of helpless to die from the virus. Government response was quick on this however, with teargas, beating gear, and lethal weapons. Here, Letelier captures what he calls a courageous “front line of youth” that stepped forward “to protect and defend other marchers and protesters.” An obvious play on the 1960s Flower Power anti-war peace movement in the US, the painting’s title and its accompanying botanicals give a sense of renewal.  Francisco Letelier, Herbarium, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 40 in In Herbarium, the artist tells us, “protestors carry flags with images of seeding plants, they walk through a landscape that contains clouds of tear gas and buildings lost in smoke. This painting is a scene at Columbia University, land of the Lenni-Lenape and Wappinger people, the indigenous residents of Manahata (“island of hills” in the Algonquian language). Here, Letelier takes us beyond a simple protest, by artfully overlapping and sometimes combining peoples, their sustenance and their challenges.  Part of the New York Botanical Garden, Columbia’s Steere Herbarium contains an historic collection of the seeds and plants used by original Native Americans; it also houses the largest collection of herbs in the Western Hemisphere. Letelier says that the corn, squash, and beans depicted here along with the cattail, are all used widely by native people of the region. He also paints in thistle, he says, because it's “an important and historic food source for Palestinians, Israeli authorities have controlled the harvest of the plant for generations, but its collection and use is an important part of tradition, resistance, and survival.”    “So much attention has been paid to plants, yet students who support, Palestinian culture, believe in peace and an end to the war in Gaza [poppies] have not been afforded the care given to the items in Columbia’s collection.”    Flower Power reminds us we cannot afford a singular focus, with botanical references taking us to Chile, to Native American lands that are now Columbia University’s campus, to the children of Gaza.

Juana Estrada Hernández, Nopalaso en Nombre Nuestras Familias, lithograph, 15 x 20 in

Juana Estrada Hernández calls herself a DACA-mented artist. Born and raised in Zacatecas, Mexico until age seven, she and her family joined millions of others from their country who emigrated to the United States. It was a childhood experience that would inform the artist’s work for years to come. Drawing from personal history and a highly cultivated innate talent, Hernández illustrates challenges surrounding Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—the US immigration policy providing relief from deportation and work permits for some immigrants arriving as minors without legal resident status. The operative word is relief; DACA is not a pathway to citizenship. And it is accorded to a fraction of those who enter the country. Hernández was in her mid-teens when she applied for DACA relief. Today, with a precise pen and a tempered palette, the artist captures acute discomfort, insecurity and fear among children separated from their families, the land, and the language familiar to them.    Making tracks since her arrival in the US, earning an MFA in printmaking, a cascade of grants, fellowships and honors, she now teaches her discipline at the nation’s premier art school, the Rhode Island School of Design. And she is still on message. “Within my work, I highlight the importance of holding on to one’s own culture as a method of resistance, pride, and celebration,” Hernández says, pointing to the wide array of indignities that Latino communities confront, mixed with Mexican folklore, Hispanic life and her own family.    Here ICE agents put a man in handcuffs, near an unmarked bus with blacked-out windows, called ¡Nopalaso en nombre de nuestras familias! (Nopalazo on behalf of our families!). “You see a child with a slingshot and a nopalaso [cactus pad].” the artist says. “Some people have seen it as an interpretation of David and Goliath. I actually took it more as what do you do when ICE comes to your door as a kid? And how do you really protect yourself and your family?”    “This piece in particular,” Hernàndez says, “it speaks to knowing your rights, which of course now, with this new administration, [the checklist if ICE knocks on your door] has been shared nationwide, in such a necessary and urgent way.”