The Smithsonian, the nation’s cultural voice established by Congress in 1846, is under attack. Financially seeded by Englishman James Smithson, who was ostensibly enamored by the great American Experiment, it has since morphed into the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, with twenty-one museums, the National Zoo, and nine research facilities. (Disclosure: my father’s art archives were acquired by the Smithsonian Museum of American History.) Yet today, it is under assault, as is The Kennedy Center—all part of the Trump administration’s attempts to control cultural narratives. It’s not going entirely as planned, with artists such as Philip Glass, Issa Rae and Renée Fleming canceling their performances.
Thankfully, the Smithsonian continues the important work of collecting and promulgating critical national histories and the current, touring exhibition couldn’t be more relevant in today’s fraught political milieu. As early as Paul Revere’s iconic work, The Boston Massacre (1770), printmakers have utilized urban space as a tactic of defiance. The 1960s, which saw the onset of the Chicano movement, was no different, tactically producing and utilizing prints as calls-to-resistance and cultural rebirth. These were not all designed to be placed in galleries or museums – they operated as expedient, low-cost productions posted publicly to educate and urge action.
Originally organized by E. Carmen Ramos, former acting chief curator and curator of Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the sixty works include forty artists representing pivotal times in Chicano history. In the 1960s, a sweeping Mexican American civil rights movement began pressing for equal rights and a renewed identification. The term Chicano was adopted by many as a marker of empowerment parallel with El Movimiento, which advocated social justice and self-determination. Civil rights were a hallmark of the Chicano Movement in concert with United Farm Workers’ (UFW) efforts to unionize workers and improve work conditions. The exhibit is organized around five key thematics reflecting this history—with one gallery devoted to contemporary, commissioned work—a smart decision. Portraiture is a foundational technique here and there is no shortage of subjects with Che Guevara, Barbara Carrasco and the ubiquitous Frida Kahlo all represented. The urgent prints, many in eye-popping palettes, are a lot to take in.
The exhibit’s tone is set in the first section, “Together We Fight,” with an iconic call-to-action work, Boycott Grapes and Lettuce (1976). The screen print on paperboard was produced by Sacramento-based Royal Chicano Airforce (RCAF) art collective founded in 1970. It’s an elegantly straightforward image and urgent missive with the UFW logo prominently placed on a stark red and black field. The RCAF was a central player in the production of resistance works, and today many of these prints are considered classic historical and aesthetic icons.
In the gallery devoted to the theme “No Guerra!” (No War!), Texas artist Vincent Valdez offers a stark departure in both palette and tone with his diptych, Winter in America(2014). It’s in bleak contrast to other works in the exhibition—a somber greyscale scene. No text or script is present in the work. Rather, with an economy of imagery, the picture depicts a barren landscape of cemetery grave markers punctuated by a horse-drawn funerary procession—the only color is a flag-draped casket yielding a heartbreaking tableau—the cost of war writ large.
In 2010, San Francisco-based Esther Hernandez responded to Arizona’s attack on immigrants by publishing Wanted —a sobering poster with the iconography of the Virgin Mary. Noted Hernandez, “I created Wanted in response to the on-going anti-immigrant/racial profiling in Arizona. La Virgen de Guadalupe represents the resilient spirit of our people, and that can never be captured or taken away.” Today, current ICE tactics have exacerbated the issue – the rogue agency snatching citizens and non-citizens alike in a dystopian 2026. The tone shifts under the rubric of the section “Rethinking America,” and Los Angeles based Julio Salgado offers a vision of transformation: a queer, undocumented immigrant transmuted into a vibrantly colored butterfly with Queer Butterfly: I Exist (2019). It’s a luminous, neon-infused vision—offering a resolute stance with an adamant optimism.
Anchoring the exhibit to the contemporary landscape, Los Angeles based artist Melissa Govea created a show-stopping Pachuca Pietà (2025). The screen print triptych, modeled on Michelangelo’s La Pietà (1498), is fashioned on shield-shaped fabric and reads as a symbol for the 1943 Zoot Suit “riots,” flanked by Meso-American deities as ethereal protectors.
In its totality, the exhibit is a testimony to art that matters—heady, urgent and daunting—and even if it seems we’ve socially regressed on several fronts, one can glean hope that past struggles, do indeed, inform the present.
