Illustrated book with thirty-two woodcuts; woodcut on paper dust jacket over paper covers; paper booklet with foreword printed on 4 leaves
Frasconi embraced the immediate, raw quality of the woodcut to address political and social oppression. The traces of that printmaking technique, which involves carving into a piece of wood, and the existing patterns of the natural material can add energy and drama to imagery. The artist also took up the illustrated book format throughout his career. Viet Nam! presents wrenching portraits of civilians aside scenes of bomb-dropping B52 airplanes, both based on newspaper photographs of the war there.
Los Desaparecidos memorializes the Latin American citizens abducted and “disappeared” by militant dictatorships across Latin America in the 1970s and ’80s. Let America Be America Again pairs stanzas of writer Langston Hughes’s titular 1935 poem, which was critical of the “American Dream,” with images of bravery that capture the text’s ultimate suggestion of hope amidst uncertainty.
420: Picturing History, 2026
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Picturing History
Gallery 420Her response to this omission was to create American People Series #20: Die. For the mural-sized painting, Ringgold depicted contemporary events using a figurative visual language—at a time when the art world celebrated abstraction.
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