(Five can be downloaded from the museum website for home printing, in keeping with Cortéz’s dedication to accessibility.) Also featured are photographs and ephemera documenting his life, among them a painting of the prison cell he occupied for 18 months as a conscientious objector during WWII. Nearly 50 of Cortéz’s wood and linoleum printing blocks - classic portraits of Civil Rights heroes like Rosa Luxemburg and Joe Hill unrestrained calls of support for miners, farm workers, and immigrants stern critiques of police violence and war - open the NMMA show. Installation view of Carlos Cortéz: 100 Años at the National Museum of Mexican Arts various printing blocks by Cortéz (photo Lori Waxman/Hyperallergic) CHema Skandal!, “La lucha continua” (The struggle is on) (2022), linocut on kitakata paper (photo Lori Waxman/Hyperallergic)

He helped found MARCH, the first Mexican arts organization in Illinois, and was a fervent supporter of the NMMA, which today holds his archives and displays his basement press, a workhorse nicknamed Gato Negro, in its permanent collection. He made a living in factories, sometimes helping to organize his fellow workers, and was a longstanding columnist and illustrator for the Industrial Worker newspaper. Born in South Milwaukee to immigrant parents who met at a Socialist Party convention, Cortéz was raised in a milieu of blue-collar work, multiple languages, pacifism, and poetry his father was an Indigenous Mexican of the Yaqui people, his mother hailed from Germany. Only the NMMA show was planned as a Cortéz tribute, but the coincidence of all three presentations is due in no small part to the enduring influence his decades of printing, mural-painting, and protest have had in a city where nearly 30 percent of the population identifies as Hispanic or Latino. What better way to celebrate his centennial than to fill the city of Chicago, where he lived from 1965 until his death in 2005, with a trio of exhibitions dedicated to the intersections between Latine printmaking and politics - Carlos Cortéz: 100 Años at the National Museum of Mexican Arts (NMMA), William Estrada: Multiples & Multitudesat the Hyde Park Art Center, and entre horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Ricoat the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA).

CHICAGO - Carlos Cortéz, the beloved artist, poet, labor journalist, and community organizer, would have turned 100 on August 13, 2023.

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