We are saddened by the loss of a great artist and dear friend to Self Help Graphics & Art. Richard Duardo was a leader in the Chicana/o arts communities. A co-founder of Centro de Arte Publico (CAP), an arts collective in Highland Park, California, that operated for approximately three or four years, between 1976 and 1980, Richard Duardo helped artists to maneuver the boundaries between politics and art. While co-founder Carlos Almaraz was encouraging others to read Maos Little Red Book, it was Duardo who lived the ideologies of art for the people. In one interview with Duardo, he recalled that during the first meeting of CAP Almaraz introduced the language from the Little Red Book, Mao’s writings on the Cultural Revolution in China. Almaraz’s speech proved to be the first of many formal discussions on Maoism and the role of the artist, and it appealed to Duardo and the others. This challenge to the group inspired Duardo to become one of “the cultural vanguard of the revolution” and to eschew “decorative, escapist art for the elite bourgeois, but to offer our services in the struggle of the proletariat.” In the 1970s, Duardo was looking for a collective that matched his political vision and avant-garde aesthetic style, and these approaches to society were transformed to suit the needs of an urban civil rights movement and artists who were trying to carve out space for respect, creativity, and a living wage. Eventually, Duardo would become the main tenant at Centro, and fashioned it into a punk music venue in his efforts to think differently against capitalism by advocating for artists as workers and for the arts as vital to social transformation. The music scene was always a pull for him: inspiring and motivating him to think about arts in multiple media. In the following years, he created numerous print shops, and always used Chicano icons and ideology to under grid his work: Hecho en Aztlan, Aztlan Multiples, Modern Multiples, Fine Arts Editions—each iteration of his master printing allowed him new freedoms and artistic expressions, but consistently democratic in nature. He produced some of the top names in serigraphy and digital arts. He also opened LACMA to younger audiences and helped the county museum think about prints by artists of color. A master printer and an artist whose work has been shown internationally, Richard Duardo will be missed.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:25:14 +0000
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