Juan Sánchez, the influential Nuyorican visual artist, teacher, writer, and curator once declared “Political art is a medium used as a weapon to hopefully recapture or regain the positive energy of celebration—to regain the goodness of humanity.” Sánchez, the child of Puerto Rican immigrants, was born and raised in Brooklyn. Encompassing a variety of mediums and techniques, including collage, painting, printmaking, photography, and video, his work is informed by his activism and engagement with issues of colonialism and its legacy, race, class, cultural identity, equality, social justice, and self-determination. At the same time, he has maintained a consistent focus on communities, families, and both personal and political histories in his work.
Printmaking has occupied a central role in his oeuvre; over several decades, he has worked in a variety of techniques and with multiple printers and publishers, to include the Tamarind Lithography Workshop and Wildwood Press, as well as the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (RBPW), the printer for Guariquen: images & words Rican/structed (1986–87).
Juan Sánchez (American, b. 1954). Escrito en Piedra, from the portfolio “Guariquen: Images and Words Rican/Structured,” 1987. Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Exit Art/The First World. Hand-colored lithograph with collage, 22 1/2 x 30 1/8 in. (57 x 76.3 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Allade, Inc. and Rosoff Foundation Gifts, 1987 (1987.204a) © Juan Sánchez
This interview was adapted from a conversation with scholar and curator Dr. Deborah Cullen-Morales that took place on October 27, 2023, during the IFPDA Print Fair in New York City. Before a large audience, Cullen-Morales and Sánchez discussed the artist’s career and considered his portfolio Guariquen: images & words Rican/structed (1986–87), whose complexity mirrors that of his experience as a Puerto Rican independentista (one who supports Puerto Rican independence) living in New York. As with much of Sánchez’s work, the portfolio title is composed of layered references. Guariquen means “come look, come see” in the language of the Taíno, Indigenous peoples who lived in the Caribbean before being decimated by Spanish colonialism, while “Rican/structed” evokes salsa musician Ray Barretto’s concept of Rican/struction. Sánchez’s term can thus be read as alluding concurrently to the construction of prints from images and words, many of them pulled from existing sources, that conjure both Puerto Rican and personal history, as well as the resilience of Puerto Rican people.
The portfolio was shown in The Met’s Johnson Gallery in the fall of 2023 in a dedicated bay, where it received much attention from visitors and inspired the event at the IFPDA where the conversation below took place. Accompanying Cullen-Morales’s interview are additional responses from Sánchez on other aspects of his practice and the Guariquen portfolio.
View of Juan Sánchez’s prints as installed in the exhibition New Acquisitions in Context: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. September 2023
Deborah Cullen-Morales:
Print was not your first medium, Juan. Can you tell me how you came to printing and your work with Robert Blackburn, Cooper Union, and Lorenzo Clayton?
Juan Sánchez:
I first met Bob Blackburn at Rutgers University, where I was doing my MFA. Unfortunately, I never took a course with him during this time, but I would visit him at least once a week and hang with him at the print shop.
In 1982, Bob opened this program at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop where artists could apply for a one-year residency. Part of the program was for the artists to take courses in printmaking. So I applied for the residency, and I got it. For one year, I took courses in etching, lithography, and monoprinting. In the end, I was among a group of artists who ended up making a portfolio together.
During that time, I was primarily engaged with painting and photography. That year was very frustrating for me because I wanted to produce masterpieces immediately. I learned the hard way that you have to become a student again in order to learn printmaking, which is a very complex process.
So I went through the year. I had a bunch of prints and proofs. I never really developed a discipline of editioning prints unless it’s a tiny edition. I was very frustrated but very engaged. I applied for a grant through the New York State Council of the Arts with a proposal to produce a suite of prints—and part of the proposal was to produce them at Bob’s print shop. I got the grant, and that’s when things started moving.
Juan Sánchez (American, b. 1954). Un Sueño Libre, from the portfolio “Guariquen: Images and Words Rican/Structured,” 1987. Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Exit Art/The First World. Hand-colored lithograph with collage, 22 3/8 x 30 in. (56.8 x 76.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Allade, Inc. and Rosoff Foundation Gifts, 1987 (1987.204e) © Juan Sánchez
I produced a series of prints, the portfolio Guariquen: Images and Words Rican/Structured, that didn’t resemble anything I was doing at the time. The prints didn’t look like student work. And most importantly, they had a real close proximity to what I was already doing in painting. I realized that I had approached printmaking from the wrong direction. I asked myself, Why not approach printmaking like I approach my mixed-media paintings? So the prints ended up being collage, chine collé layer prints, where I would print on several sheets of paper—cut, tear, collage, print again, collage, and print again. I experimented by combining lithography with photography, silver gelatin prints with etching, and screenprinting.
Juan Sánchez (American, b. 1954). La Lucha Continua, from the portfolio “Guariquen: Images and Words Rican/Structured,” 1986. Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Exit Art/The First World. Hand-colored lithograph and screenprint with collage, 22 5/8 x 30 1/4 in. (57.4 x 76.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Allade, Inc. and Rosoff Foundation Gifts, 1987 (1987.204c) © Juan Sánchez
This particular print is La Lucha Continua (1986), a combination of screenprinting and lithography. I would start with screenprinting, then do lithography on top, and then go back on top of that with screenprinting. I also incorporated silver gelatin photographic prints and religious cards. All of a sudden, what was going on in my painting began to happen in these prints. In the end, this portfolio was a breakthrough for me.
Cullen-Morales:
Let’s explore some of the imagery that was already informing your painting practice when you came to printmaking.
Sánchez:
While I was at Cooper Union, my concentration was in painting, but I also minored in photography. My photography was very much influenced by collectives of Puerto Rican photographers. The name of the group, which exists today, is En Foco. Back in 1974, I saw this incredible exhibition called Dos Mundos that showcased the photographic work of Puerto Ricans in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and those who were documenting life on the island as well.
That exhibition really turned me on and kind of pointed the way for my photographic work. Those photographs absolutely influenced me. I discovered that I was living in an environment with all these murals and all this graffiti and all these posters plastered on the walls. And there was a time when I was doing a lot of postering on the walls and spray painting slogans because I was involved with a group for Puerto Rican independence.
Juan Sánchez designed this poster in 1980. Produced in both Spanish and English, it was used for street postering and as a poster insert for the newspaper Libertad, published by the National Committee to Free Puerto Rican Prisoners of War
Cullen-Morales:
The fellowship you previously referred to was the Third World Artists Fellowship. You also did some of the prints for Guariquen at Cooper Union.
Sánchez:
Yes. The printer I worked with at Cooper was a friend, a classmate by the name of Lorenzo Clayton. And he’s been teaching there since he graduated. We made the last two prints. The thing about this project is that when I do work with a print shop, and I work with quite a number of print shops, they have a budget. We can only do so many colors, and that is the edition. And we have to follow through with that religiously.
But at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, the craziness is that if we were doing twelve plates, let’s do twelve plates. And with Lorenzo, he was also crazy. It’s like, let’s do whatever in screenprinting, lithography, and collage. So these are prints that are layered and extremely labor-intensive. A lot of work went into those prints to the point where we were aiming for a larger edition, but we ended up doing an edition of twenty-five.
Juan Sánchez (American, b. 1954). Tres Banderas, 1988. Lithograph, serigraph, and laser print on paper, 22 x 30 in. (55.88 x 76.2 cm). © Juan Sánchez, Courtesy of the artist
The second print, Tres Banderas (1988), I did with Lorenzo was printed in 1988, about a year after we completed the Guariquen portfolio. Again, it’s a combination of screenprinting and lithography. For the first time, I also incorporated laser color prints on Rives paper. This is like three, four layers of paper, one on top of each other, with a little bit of printmaking in between. Everything had to be planned out step by step. And I woke up late one evening worrying about the complex process.
I may have an idea in mind; I may start with a photograph; I may start with a text, but it’s totally improvised. I like the idea that when I start on a body of work, the work as it progresses becomes more relevant to me and exposes me to things that perhaps were in my subconscious. And there it is in front of me. I like the fact that improvising along the way brings out certain elements from the subconscious that I have to face. And so at the end, I have a painting or a print that really presents something of me or reflects something that becomes a realization.
The Guariquen portfolio opened up a lot of layers and references because I dedicated one of them to the artist Ana Mendieta. The text actually comes from a poem by the activist poet Juan Antonio Corretjer. He published a book called Yerba bruja (1970), and it speaks to the battles and the struggle of the Taíno Indians against the Spanish conquest. The symbolism and the metaphor in his poetry were so powerful for me that I also decided to use them as part of that print.
I take bits and pieces from Puerto Rican poetry, along with other Latin American poetry, or even work coming out of the African American experience, the Native American experience, and the Nuyorican experience, and I incorporate them into the work. I feel that the photographic image has a whole other level of communication. There’s the cliche about a picture being a thousand words or whatever, but the photographic image, drawings, paintings, and text, they’re all different layers for creating images and putting one in a state of reflection. They all semiotically play off each other. So there’s also the influence of conceptual art.
I like the idea that when I start on a body of work, the work as it progresses becomes more relevant to me and exposes me to things that perhaps were in my subconscious.
Cullen-Morales:
And your activism, I want to know at the same time that you’re doing this very complex work with photography, collage, and printmaking, you’re also painting, using imagery from religious iconography to Taíno, pre-Columbian imagery to contemporary and street imagery. You’re teaching, writing, curating, using poetry and music, all these things are coming together in a rich language that you created in printmaking.
Sánchez:
Yeah, a lot of the work was created when I was still doing activist work. And those pieces and my affiliation with many of the activists involved in the Puerto Rican independence movement—many of them ended up in jail—that was something that was very much alive. This is what I was going through. And creating this work and having that lineage, that linkage with them, it’s something very different than someone making a political statement but has no direct connection or experience with it.
I try to cover a lot of territory that speaks to my own Puerto Rican-American culture. I feel that my identity is divided into many different places. Through my identification with the civil rights and human rights movements in the United States and internationally, I began to make connections and find various points of affinity. So for me to use a piece of poem by Nuyorican poet Sandra María Esteves and to take a stanza from Julia de Burgos and implement another part of a poem by Amiri Baraka or Jayne Cortez, it’s all relative because they all reflect my identity on many levels.
Cullen-Morales:
Can you tell us where you were doing some of these prints because you’ve been known to collaborate with so many different print studios and print workshops?
Sánchez:
Cries and Pain (2000) is a good example because it was a collaboration between Dieu Donne, a paper mill, and the Lower East Side printshop. A separate lithograph was torn and collaged directly onto handmade paper. It’s a print devoted to my wife. And it’s hard to read, but when you look at the print from an angle—and this is also part of the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art—there’s a text, which is a poetic piece that I wrote about my wife, and it’s silkscreened on top with transparent acrylic medium. So when you look at it from the front, you can’t see it, but from an angle, the text becomes very evident.
On combining mediums
Sánchez:
I have been approached by certain printmakers about the Guariquen portfolio because they had issue with the way I was combining the different mediums. Like there was one former professor who I appreciate very much. He was a mentor to me, a sculptor and printmaker. I will not mention his name. When I was showing him the prints, he was looking very carefully. And then he said, well, I guess if it works for you, it’s all right. You know? But he’s a printmaker, his main medium is etching. So he would ask me, and what’s this? Oh, that’s silkscreened. And what’s that on top? That’s lithography. And he would look at it in a somewhat dismissive way.
Others are purists when it comes to printmaking. It’s almost like that whole argument: Why are you putting oils on top of acrylic? And my attitude is that you get a different quality, a different surface. The red of a screenprint is opaque: it’s flat, it sits on the surface. The photography, the paper, is absorbing the ink. You have all of these kinds of dynamics that are taking place. And I like those differentiated surfaces. Even though my work is very political and personal, as a formalist, I’m very engaged with the dynamic of painting and printmaking. I’m very engaged with surface quality. Some people didn’t appreciate that, but that was way back in the early days.
And I’m not saying I’m the first person that did it, because you had people like Rauschenberg playing around and doing that kind of experimentation. But I came to it in a very natural way, and in a very conscientious way, because I was constantly stimulated by the various techniques of printmaking and combining them created a kind of sensation and visual quality that I was already experimenting with painting. There was some pushback, sure, but I’m like a mule—I have blinders on.
The influence of street art
Sánchez:
I always had a sense of community—a sense of, you know, that we all have our own individualities and whatnot, but there’s also the collective consciousness. Being aware of where you live, who are the people that you live with, and how much a community contributes in terms of our own individuality. As a photographer, that’s always been my state of mind. It’s like what’s manifested out in the street, the people that I shoot portraits of are all part of this community that in some conscious and subconscious way influence each other and embrace each other. I always felt that art should stem from that, even though there’s this other world—the white cube and the museums and so on. So trying to figure out how to cross both environments simultaneously and try to make myself accessible beyond conversations like this one.
When people in the community look at the work, they understand it. They may ask questions about certain symbols or whatever, but it speaks very clearly. And to engage with them and even do workshops with them, especially with the youth, and to show how much power they have ingrained within them because of who they are—that also feeds into my work, because I feel like I’m contributing to something much larger than the art world.
From the very beginning, I always felt like one foot was here and the other foot was there. There’s no way that I’m going to cross one side or the other. There has to be that bridge. In the same way that you create a bridge to teach people how to read. Then once they learn how to read, let’s teach them how to read and understand poetry. Same thing with music. You know what I mean? It’s like this pop music. But I’ll sit them down and listen to Coltrane. Whoah! Okay, let’s land here and let’s pick up certain things. Because pop music has taken a lot from jazz and folk music. For me, I’m very caught up with being accessible at the same time as I’m pushing the envelope as an artist, as an intellectual.
The role of language and writing
Sánchez:
The theme as soon as I entered into fine arts was to make art about myself, my personal identity, and my culture. My parents migrated from Puerto Rico, in the fifties. So I was mostly raised in Spanish-speaking communities. It wasn’t just a Puerto Rican community but also an African American community. My first tongue was Spanish, and I was pretty fluent. But when I started going to public school, I had language problems, and I had difficulty assimilating into the English language. Gradually, that got better and better. For better or worse. Maybe it’s because I was hanging out and learned English in the streets, you know? After a certain point, I began to lose grasp of my Spanish. So language has always been a back and forth, a challenge.
Text always played a role in my work, particularly when I started using photography and other elements as collage, which began in graduate school. My work was very similar to the Mexican muralists and the muralist movement on the Lower East Side. In graduate school, I reached a point where I got a little bored with the work. It was a little fastidious because I got into the habit of making drawings and studies and then moving on to the large canvas. But I ended up with paintings that were like, okay, looks good, next. There was no element of surprise. I’m still looking for revelation in my work. I want it to reveal to me more of who I am. Since I was a child, I always felt that art has been a vehicle to express.
Juan Sánchez (American, b. 1954). "It is the roots of who I am that remains - suppression notwithstanding", 1987–88. Oil, cut and pasted photographs and wax crayons on canvas, 60 1/8 x 103 3/8in. (152.7 x 262.6cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, George A. Hearn Fund, 1988 (1988.69a-d) © Juan Sánchez
Language has always been a part of me. So it found its way into my work when I started experimenting with collage, using my photography, because at Cooper Union I was a painting and photography major. A lot of the work that I documented in my neighborhood and in other Puerto Rican neighborhoods was incorporated into my collages, and the text oftentimes has been my own writing. Other times, I also appropriated text from newspaper clippings, quotations from certain individuals, poetry.
I was very much influenced by one of my professors at Cooper Union, Hans Haacke. I was following his work and always seeing his exhibitions. He was making these interesting wall pieces incorporating text. He would also give us interesting assignments. I switched gears and started incorporating all of these elements. I continue using text and images with the understanding that there’s a semiotic process and dynamic that takes place in terms of what a photographic or a drawn image projects as an idea, an image, or a concept, in contrast to the written language, which has a way of illuminating or creating other images by use of metaphors. So the play of image and text as an image, a transmitting component, playing off each other, complementing and embracing each other, sometimes contradicting each other.
I also got involved with an activist group for Puerto Rican independence. I went to their meetings. I was a participant and helped organize their demonstrations. There were times when I designed posters and flyers for them, and I would find myself out in the street with two other people with a pail of wheat paste and a brush to plaster these leaflets on the streets of Manhattan. So I found myself in the street, late hours, with two other people. One of them was a lookout for the police, and we were out in the street postering. But the following day, our work would be tagged and covered by graffiti. Also, other stuff was covering our stuff. So it was a back-and-forth thing that we were doing to make sure that the people in the communities would see our posters and that we could mobilize them. It was kind of interesting how these walls are so layered. It reminded me of Abstract Expressionism.
I’ve always been enamored with political art, starting with the Mexican muralists. I was also very attracted to abstract, minimalist, and conceptual art and very caught up with film. So I decided to see if I could experiment in the studio, break away from what I’ve been doing, and enter into a whole different field that is new and stimulating. I stopped making sketches. Sometimes, I would make a little scheme, but it became a total improvisational process. I would start maybe with a photograph that I shot some time ago, and then I would bring other elements. Whether it’s newspaper clippings or ripping chunks of plastic stuff on the street, or even robbing advertisements from subway cars and starting to incorporate that. And I would think of poems from Nuyorican poets like Pedro Pietri or Sandra Maria Esteve. I’ve always been buying and collecting not only Nuyorican poetry, but African American poetry, Latin American poetry, and just reading it.
Juan Sánchez (American, b. 1954). Para Carmen María Colón, from the portfolio “Guariquen: Images and Words Rican/Structured,” 1986. Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Exit Art/The First World. Hand-colored lithograph with collage, 22 1/4 x 30 in. (56.3 x 76 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Allade, Inc. and Rosoff Foundation Gifts, 1987 (1987.204d) © Juan Sánchez
And I was reading this book called Palante (1969), which is a series of essays and testimonies by members of this Puerto Rican organization the Young Lords Party, and I incorporated one of the quotes by Pablo Yoruba Guzman. He described his mother in a very loving and real way and how he felt safe with her. When I read that, it brought me to tears because it was like I was saying these words. It was as if I was talking about my mother.
Breakthroughs with the Guariquen portfolio
Sánchez:
Those prints were a breakthrough because I finally got a handle of how to deal with printmaking. They’re collages, but they’re also prints. Sometimes I would do a little hand coloring and hand drawing on my prints. Color played a prominent role. That portfolio opened up the floodgates. After about maybe two years of frustration, I had to try it out, put it to the test. But like most broke artists, I just didn’t have the funds to say, let me take a dive.
Juan Sánchez (American, b. 1954). Recoge Tu Destino, from the portfolio “Guariquen: Images and Words Rican/Structured,” 1986. Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Exit Art/The First World. Hand-colored lithograph and screenprint with collage, 22 1/4 x 30 in. (56.5 x 76.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Allade, Inc. and Rosoff Foundation Gifts, 1987 (1987.204b) © Juan Sánchez
The portfolio changed my approach to and understanding of printmaking, which continued to open up in the following years as I learned many different ways to apply these techniques. And it also had an incredible impact in terms of how I was visualizing ideas and concepts. It was a breakthrough in terms of my other mediums, even when I talk about video work. The prints just became a never-ending manifestation of how I’ve been approaching my art all these years.
Work as a teacher
Sánchez:
I got the teaching bug at Cooper Union. A group of students started the Saturday Program and would mobilize high school students from all over Manhattan to take art classes. No portfolio requirement. All they had to do was write an essay about why they wanted to take art classes on painting, sculpture, photography, and even architecture. This was all taught by undergraduates. They would interview students who were interested in teaching the Saturday Program. I started teaching in the program during my junior year and continued until I graduated. I taught painting. A number of these students came from my alma mater, the High School of Art and Design. That was a very exciting moment for me. I was very happy engaging with these kids and teaching, seeing how they evolved and developed. All of them were at different levels. But it was interesting how someone who had not taken an art class evolved and often even surpassed those with more art experience. That left a very strong impression.
They had a teacher’s assistant position in art history when I started graduate studies at Rutgers. So I did a semester with a professor in art history. It went very well. I don’t know if these teaching positions have changed, but back then, the classes were six hours, and they would meet twice a week. The professor would teach the first part, and then the TA would follow with the second part based on what the professor was teaching. So we would sit down and develop a syllabus. The other professor that I worked with for three semesters was Leon Golub. I went to Rutgers because Leon was teaching there. Later on, I came across people like Melvin Edwards and Bob Blackburn. I learned so much in my tutorials with Leon, but I learned even more from his teaching method. His class was always conversational, almost improvised.
From that experience I started to teach as an adjunct at William Paterson University and then later got a full-time position at Hunter College. I learned to give students assignments that not only provided technical skills, but also gave them insight into themselves through exercises. Through these assignments they find out more about who they are. My work is so caught up with myself, not only in terms of my ethnic and racial identity, but also the spiritual aspect of it. The way I compose things still harkens to Catholic cathedrals in my neighborhood and the shrines my mother and my father would build in their apartments. With these assignments, I first try very hard for the students to know how to use a pencil in combination with ink in combination with watercolor. I always get them caught up like I do in mixed media. Then I want them to come out with a body of work where they talk about themselves. A lot of students are extremely shy, sometimes very repressed.
I want them to expose themselves to themselves and to be able to talk with a certain degree of confidence, freedom, and trust. I try to create a community where we begin not only to talk but to care about each other. I try to create that kind of collective consciousness, even with my graduate seminars. Competition is out the door. Let’s find out more about who we are and why we are artists and not get caught up in being famous or something. What is your art about, and where does the truth play out even in your mark making. I’m just a facilitator. Whatever they make, whatever they do, whether it’s abstract or figurative or formal or social. Whatever you’re doing, whatever it is that you’re trying to do, I’m here to facilitate. So I give them a lot of advice and references to other artists.
I treat students as peers where our conversation is always a give and take. And I learn so much from them as well, you know. Teaching has also been a revelation because of what I mentioned earlier, but more from the stimulation. I see something happen in the studio, and then I say, oh my God, that’s my solution to this painting that I’ve been working on for the past six months. You learn from them. Teaching has been a very important part of my existence as an artist.
