The UT Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art is currently featuring ten Chicano art prints from the Gilberto Cardenas-Dolores Garcia collection. Among those on exhibit are Carlos Cortez, Leo Limón, and Alma López, discussed in this story.
Carlos Cortez, “Braceros de Texas” . Courtesy of UT Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Graphic artist Carlos Cortez was a Chicago-based writer, poet, illustrator, muralist, and activist. He is best known for his prints and illustrations that address labor rights, union organizing, and culture. As a longstanding Chicago community activist, Cortéz was integral to the founding of the National Mexican Museum of Art in Chicago.
During World War II, Cortez was sent to federal prison for 2 years for refusing to be drafted because it went against his pacifist/socialist views. It was during those long months behind bars that Cortez began to dream of art as a weapon of conscience. He saw that a woodblock or linocut print could voice protest as powerfully as a picket line.
UT Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
After his release, Cortez settled in Chicago, the city that became both his studio and his battleground. In a small workspace he dubbed Gato Negro Press, Cortez printed hundreds of images—miners with calloused hands, farm workers beneath a brutal sun, poets and laborers bound by solidarity. Each print was a manifesto carved in grain and ink
Leo Limón with UCLA professor Raymund Paredes. [1990] Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Deeply influenced by Mexican artist and printer José Guadalupe Posada, Cortez forged a visual language both bold and compassionate. Like Posada, he gave voice to the voiceless. He also wrote corridos, political hymns, and stories, chronicling the everyday realities of laborers for the Industrial Worker, the newspaper of the IWW.
Leo Limón, “Hummingbird Spirit.” Courtesy of UT Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
In mural and print, Cortez immortalized those who toiled in fields and factories. His hands carried the mission his parents began: to lift art from the gallery into the street, from the private collection into the public voice. By the time of his passing, the works of Carlos Cortez hung in community centers, union halls, and museums—including the Smithsonian Institution.
Carlos Cortez was a people’s artist in the truest sense—a craftsman of conscience who made art speak the language of struggle, peace, and dignity.
Leo Limón’s print in the Blanton exhibit, “Hummingbird Spirit,” touches on the artist’s love of pre-colonial Aztec and Maya cultures. Limón is best known for his vibrant murals and prints produced at Self Help Graphics & Art, where he helped build one of the most influential Latino art institutions in the country.
For the past 50 years, Limón has been a premier printmaker and cultural activist whose career has been deeply intertwined with the growth of the Chicano art movement and the communities of East Los Angeles. His work brings together color, humor, and public presence, transforming everyday urban space into a site of cultural affirmation.
Self Help Graphics art space in the 1990s. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Limón was born in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, in 1952 to a working-class Mexican American family. His parents’ early life in Chavez Ravine before displacement by urban renewal left vivid stories of a lost community that shaped his sense of belonging. In an interview with art historian Karen Davalos, Limón explained that as a teen, he developed a fascination with visual language that fed his emerging artistic eye. His childhood brimmed with sensory memories—radio music, television’s glow, family gatherings, and neighborhood rhythms—that deepened his connection to Mexican culture.
The 1968 Chicano Blowouts at Lincoln High School awakened Limón’s political awareness, while Saturday art classes and the Otis Art Institute linked art to community activism. A sports injury redirected his energy toward creative expression, which later expanded as a combat photographer during his military service. Limón’s life reflects discipline and imagination—an artist shaped by barrio memory and the enduring search for self and meaning.
Limón’s relationship to printmaking deepened through a friendship with Master Printmaker Richard Duardo, whose knowledge and generosity opened the door for Limón to begin silkscreen and stencil work. Limón credits Duardo with teaching him major techniques and helping him understand the possibilities of print as an art form. At Public Art Center and later at Self Help Graphics, Limón learned to cut stencils, handle color separations, and work with the logic of layered images.
Alma López, “Mnesic Myths.” Courtesy of UT Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
At Self Help Graphics, Limón also helped develop the annual Día de los Muertos celebration and contributed to the Atelier printmaking program, both of which became important platforms for Latino artistic expression and intergenerational mentorship. His images of dancers, skulls, hearts, and Indigenous symbols reflect both joy and seriousness. He speaks about Day of the Dead not only as a celebration, but as a space to think about death, sacrifice, and responsibility.
Later, Limón also found success on the Westside through galleries and collectors, especially through Robert Berman’s gallery. Yet even there, his work retained its connection to the barrio and to the symbolic language he had built over time.
One of Limón’s recurring motifs, the heart, grew into a major visual signature. The heart became not just an image, but a gesture of exchange. For Limón, art remains both philosophy and activism: a way to renew ancient ideas in modern form, connect LA’s urban life to Mexica cosmology, and honor the mentors and women who shaped his world. His canvases aren’t just paintings—they’re living stories where every symbol and stroke carries the history and heartbeat of Chicano art.
Alma López’s print in the Blanton’s exhibit, “Mnesic Myths,” is a 1999 screen print that reworks Aztec-inflected imagery in a contemporary Chicana context. The images show one woman kneeling over another sleeping woman, a composition that recalls the myth of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, with floral, aquatic, butterfly, and rainbow motifs surrounding the figures.
López is a Mexican-born Chicana artist whose digitally based work reimagines Mexican and Catholic imagery through a feminist, queer, and politically critical lens. Her art is especially known for challenging traditional images of the Virgin of Guadalupe while exploring gender, sexuality, colonization, racism, and Chicana identity. López’s art is closely engaged with Mexican and Chicana/o traditions reimagined through the artist’s queer and feminist experience.
Born in 1966 in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, López later moved to Los Angeles, where she became deeply connected to the city’s Chicana and queer art communities. She earned degrees from UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine, along with photography training at UCLA Extension. López is particularly interested in increasing the visibility and respect towards Chicana and Mexican women.
López’s best-known works include the “Our Lady and Lupe and Sirena series,” which helped establish her as a major figure in contemporary Chicana art. These works use digital collage and print to merge Catholic iconography with Indigenous references, creating images that question patriarchal cultural narratives and reclaim space for women and queer identities.
López’s 2001 digital print, “Our Lady,” became widely controversial after being shown in Santa Fe, where Catholic leaders and activists protested the work. The backlash became part of the artwork’s public meaning, turning the piece into a broader debate about censorship, representation, and the rights of Chicana artists to reinterpret sacred symbols. López responded by emphasizing that her work centers strong women and the lived realities of Chicanas rather than emphasizing shock value or simple provocation.
López is important because she helped expand digital art within Chicana/o art and made feminist, queer reinterpretations of cultural icons visible in a major way. Her work continues to matter for the way it links artistic innovation with activism, especially around body autonomy, Indigenous memory, and resistance to censorship.
In a 2026 Daily Art Magazine essay, “Alma López: Crossing the Borders of Identity, Sexuality, and Religion,” by Iolanda Munck, López discussed an East Los Angeles mural titled “Las Four.” The mural consisted of actual photographs depicting young women who lived in local housing projects. The women referenced in the background are Dolores Huerta [one of the leading contemporary civil rights activists], Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz [one of the most famous Mexican feminist poets of the 17th century], Rigoberta Menchú [a central contemporary revolutionary from Guatemala], and lastly, one of the soldaderas representing the women fighting in the Mexican revolution.
The artists all illustrate the way works on paper and murals played a major role in raising public consciousness and bringing history and cultural icons to a wider audience.
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Copyright 2026 by Ricardo Romo. All photo credits as indicated.