visual advocacy: favianna rodriguez

"Rodriguez is renown for her vibrant posters dealing with issues such as war, immigration, globalization, and social movements. By creating lasting popular symbols - where each work is the multiplicand and its location the multiplier - her work interposes private and public space, as the art viewer becomes the participant carrying art beyond the borders of the museum."



Favianna Rodriguez works as a printmaker and digital artist, based in Oakland, California. Schooled by political poster artists as a young age, she has taken those experiences into her own work. Favianna creates posters dealing with a variety of different social and cultural issues like immigration, racism, homophobia, sexism and corporate irresponsibility-- many of these are done for non-profit organizations, alongside her own personal work that journeys into similar social issues. She enjoys the poster as a vehicle for her message because they can be produced in multiples and distributed for a large amount of people to see.

"What I loved about printmaking is that you didn't have a one-of-a-kind. In Mexico I was making these huge paintings and drawings, and that's it. There's just one of them. ... I don't like this idea of having one thing that's really valuable."

One of the things I think that's great about Favianna is that she's not simply an activist in her work, but makes it a big part of her life as well. She's the co-founder of the Taller Tupac Amaru printing studio, which not only creates political posters, but encourages a resurgence in the screenprinting medium as a tool for social change. She also works as a teacher and is passionate about passing on these skills and ideas of revolution to the next generation. As a co-founder of the Eastside Arts Alliance, she works to help support a creative environment, promote social change and improve the quality of life within her neighborhood. Programs like these work as cultural centers for the community where people of all backgrounds can come together and create based not necessarily on race, but on their passion for culture and the arts. Her design work can be seen at TUMIS, a design firm that helps socially-conscious organizations engage different communities. On top of all this, she's also co-created a book with Josh MacPhee called Reproduce and Revolt!-- a bilingual guide that shows some of the best activist design from dozens of countries, and educates readers on how to do it themselves, or as she calls it, "a graphic toolbox for political activists all over the world".

Another thing I discovered reading through her blog (where I spent a good majority of my reading-time-- she has a lot of interesting things to say and stays incredibly aware of everything going on not only locally, but around the world) and website is that often times, she not only creates posters in response to some well-researched political issues, but puts them up as PDFs for download so that anyone reading can print them out and stick them wherever they feel appropriate. Back in June she had blogged about the oil situation in Peru, and a day later provided posters for everyone to utilize. She has a downloads section on her site that works similarly. Favianna is also practicing a lot of what we've talked about in class in regards to responsible design and art-making: being aware of who you're collaborating with, giving credit where credit is due, etc. I thought her various entries on Shepard Fairey were a pretty interesting response to the article we read about his work in class a few weeks ago.

She really has an overwhelming amount of work in all sorts of fields (print, posters, paintings, installation, design, web) and it's easy to see in her blog that she continues to experiment and dabble in a little bit of everything-- some of her recent posts show her preparing for a shadow puppet show. But more importantly, she has a large hand in the community, both locally and around the globe, attempting to involve people in what she does and activating people to be activists! In a lot of ways she feels like the embodiment of the majority of the things we've covered the past few weeks... which is pretty cool. It also seems that right from the beginning she was able to find a way to work in an area in which she's both interested in and passionate about, then build upon it, which is pretty inspiring to anyone who thinks it's about working your way up the ladder to be able to do what you want to do.

Oh yeah, and a lot of her work is not only powerful, but pretty beautiful too:







Cool stuff!