Farm Workers

Emmanuel C. Montoya

Farm Workers depicts the plight of all farmworkers, bending all day under a blazing sun as they harvest crops for the voracious American marketplace. Organized farmworkers are visible at the edge of the field picketing for a united farmworkers union with fair pay and decent working conditions while a few workers continue to pick the fields under the blazing sun. Seymour Kaplan (1919-2011) , to whom this work is dedicated, was a printmaker who studied at Mexico City College in 1949 and later worked at El Taller de Grafica Popular in Mexico City.

Emmanuel Catarino Montoya, a descendent of Apache and Mexican heritages, was born in Corpus Christi, Texas on April 16, 1952. Montoya resides in the San Francisco Bay Area where he attended public schools. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1985 and a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking in 1991 from San Francisco State University.

According to Montoya, the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, the master printmakers and muralists of 20th century Mexico and Latin America, and the Federal Art Project Works Progress Administration in North American during the 1930s and 40s, influenced his style. When he was a young artist living in San Francisco n the 1960s, Bill Graham's rock concert posters, with their splashing, colorful imagery and flowing text that represented the art and music of the time, had a major impact on the art he was producing.