FREE DOWNLOAD

FREE DOWNLOAD Roundtable will bring together members of AgitArte and Justseeds for a lively discussion on collaborative socially engaged poster-making today. Artist and AgitArte board member Javier Maldonado-O'Farrill, AgitArte’s Visual Art Director José Hernández Díaz (RISD BFA Illustration), and members of Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, Erik Ruin (TBC), Josh MacPhee (TBC), Meredith Stern, and Sanya Hyland will discuss the historic impact that posters have had across the world in supporting civic engagement, empowerment, and bridging movements. Both organizations have collaborated for over twenty years and this roundtable marks the first public conversation between members of both groups.

This roundtable is presented in conjunction with the exhibition FREE DOWNLOAD Arte Popular Ahora on view at Empire Street Window AS220 in August 2024. 

Free. Registration for this in-person program is requested.

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AgitArte is an organization of working class artists and cultural organizers who work at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality and ideology. Through a praxis of cultural solidarity, creative process and popular education, AgitArte initiates and facilitates arts and cultural projects with grassroots communities that contest U.S. cultural hegemony and propose alternatives to existing systems of oppression.

With members working from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative operates both as a unified collaboration of similarly minded printmakers and as a loose collection of creative individuals with unique viewpoints and working methods. Justseeds believe in the transformative power of personal expression in concert with collective action.

AgitArte is an organization of working class artists and cultural organizers who work at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality and ideology. Based in Santurce, Puerto Rico and Boston, Massachusetts, AgitArte initiates and facilitates arts and cultural projects with grassroots communities that contest U.S. cultural hegemony and propose alternatives to existing systems of oppression. Through a praxis of cultural solidarity, creative process and popular education, their creative work centers the experiences of oppressed people in resistance through  interdisciplinary storytelling/media, and their mutual aid, trainings, workshops and running a physical space for educational programming in Santurce, Puerto Rico. https://www.agitarte.org/

With members working from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative operates both as a unified collaboration of similarly minded printmakers and as a loose collection of creative individuals with unique viewpoints and working methods. Justseeds believe in the transformative power of personal expression in concert with collective action. To this end, we produce collective portfolios, contribute graphics to grassroots struggles for justice, work collaboratively both in- and outside the co-op, build large sculptural installations in galleries, and wheatpaste on the streets—all while offering each other daily support as allies and friends.

https://justseeds.org/

Javier Maldonado-O'Farrill is an organizer, photojournalist, printmaker and educator. A member of the board of directors of AgitArte, he's also a founding member of the puppet theater collective Papel Machete and was one of his co-directors. Javier has an MFA in Printmaking and Painting from Rochester Institute of Technology and a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Puerto Rico. His work has been exhibited internationally in the United States, Japan, Cuba, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Spain, Panama, and Portugal. He is also a professor of printmaking at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico, and at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras. @jmofarrill

José Hernández Díaz is AgitArte’s Visual Art Director and leads Datos y Dibujos, a critical project that facilitates rapid cultural response with powerful imagery and political analysis. He has illustrated several award-winning YA novels and has created much of AgitArte’s visual artwork in the last decade, José created the branding and design with Dey Hernández for the When We Fight, We Win! book, and for the annual Titeretada Festival in Puerto Rico with Javier Maldonado. José is also a puppeteer and has been a member of Papel Machete since 2007. He received his BFA in Illustration from Rhode Island School of Design. José currently lives in Santurce, Puerto Rico. @agitarte_cultural_works

Erik Ruin is a Michigan-raised, Philadelphia-based printmaker, shadow puppeteer, paper-cut artist, etc., who has been lauded by the New York Times for his "spell-binding cut-paper animations." His work oscillates between the poles of apocalyptic anxieties and utopian yearnings, with an emphasis on empathy, transcendence and obsessive detail. He is a founding member of the international Justseeds Artists' Cooperative, and co-author of the book Paths Toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism (w/ Cindy Milstein, PM Press, 2012). His  work has been recognized with grants from the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, nominations for the Art Matters and United States Artists fellowships, and residencies at the Macdowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, AS220, and 40th st AIR. https://www.erikruin.info/ 

Josh MacPhee is a designer, artist, and archivist. He is a founding member of both the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements based in Brooklyn, NY (InterferenceArchive.org). MacPhee is the author and editor of numerous publications, including Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now and Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. He has organized the Celebrate People's History poster series since 1998 and has been designing book covers for many publishers for the past decade (AntumbraDesign.org). His most recent book is An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels (Common Notions, 2019), a compendium of information about political music and radical cultural production. 

Meredith Stern obtained a BFA in Ceramics at Tulane University in 1998. In 1999 she co-founded a collectively run living and art space in New Orleans in a warehouse they called Nowe Miasto. In 2005 she moved to Providence, Rhode Island where she currently resides. She has developed a multifaceted art practice that includes printmaking, ceramics, zine making, and gardening. In 2007 she was a founding member of The Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative. Her work is in the permanent collections at the Library of Congress, The RISD Museum, the Book Arts Collection at the New York MOMA, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.  https://meredithstern.org/

Sanya Hyland is an illustrator, printmaker, and letterpress printer based in both Boston, Massachusetts, and Mexico City, Mexico. She received her BFA in Illustration  from MassArt in 2006 and is currently completing a MFA in Art & Design at Mexico’s UNAM.  She has been involved with various print shops in Mexico City, including the Mujeres Grabando Resistencias collective, and she founded and ran Santa Rosa Letterpress in Mexico City from 2012 to 2017. Her work often focuses on questions of immigration, gender justice, climate justice, and biodiversity. In her illustration work she has collaborated with various social justice and environmental groups such as AgitArte, Center for Biological Diversity, People’s Paper Coop, and the Climate Strike campaign.  She has been a proud member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative since 2015. https://www.sanyahyland.com