In this catalogue essay, Victor Alejandro Sorell considers the 36-year career (spanning 1964–2000) of the Chicano artist Carlos Cortez, praising him as the “quintessential artist-reporter,” and emphasizing his virtuosity as a master printmaker and as an artist who gives voice to the common people. Sorell contends that the artist, throughout his works, whether woodcuts, linocuts, paintings, or poems, seeks “ . . . to engage the vox populi in exuberant dialogue that matters.” Frequently, those dialogues revolve around workers’ rights, political injustice, and the pleasures of life itself. To Cortez, art is a means of communication, and he makes great use of the hand operating as a discursive device in his work—either as demonstrative of his subject’s speech or as an evocative call to viewers to voice their own thoughts. When hands are not conjuring up the spoken word in Cortez’s visual works, they can also often be found holding a pen for writing or thrusting themselves out of the painting in defense of human rights.

This essay by the Chicago-based art historian and activist Victor Alejandro Sorell appeared in a catalogue accompanying a retrospective of Carlos Cortez’s work organized by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago in 2001. A central figure in the Chicago art community during the second half of the twentieth century, Carlos Cortez (1923–2005) was an artist, cartoonist, printmaker, photographer, poet, and political activist. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Cortez’s father was an organizer for the industrial Workers of the World and his mother, who was German, was a socialist and a pacifist. Cortez spent his life in the Midwest, finally moving to Chicago in 1965. His graphic art addresses Chicano, Latino, and Native American issues; Mexican-American and Latino identity and culture; and workers’ rights. Because Cortez’s works focus the lives and concerns of working people—whether in urban or rural contexts—they address the topic of “Issues of Race, Class and Gender in the Visual Arts of Latino-America.” In addition, since so much of Cortez’s artistic output consisted of graphic arts that called for a just society, this article addresses the topic of “In Pursuit of Democracy: Graphics and Community-building.”