Untitled (Face)

Jerry Concha

Chicano artist Gerald "Jerry" Concha printed this color lithograph at the studio of Master Printer Ernest F. deSoto, who helped cement the artistic oeuvre of Mexican-American/Latin American/Chicano artists in the Bay Area through his workshops. Prior to his work in lithography, Concha was known for his abstract expressionist paintings and his mural works in San Francisco's Mission District. He began working with deSoto in the late 1970s.

Like much of Concha's representational work, he dismantles the human visage as an object of decoration in favor of its use as a conduit for emotion and the intimate process of individual interpretation. One might see a smiling face; another might see a crying face. The dream-like quality of the portrait, whose ghostly subject is rendered in a monochromatic palette, is set off by the addition of bright primary colors that nearly vibrate against the inky background.

At the time of this work's creation, Concha had been deeply immersed in the formation of Galeria de la Raza, a Chicano gallery in the Mission, for nearly two decades. In addition to promoting the work of artists whose ancestral roots traced to Mexico and South and Central America, the gallery's aim was to dispell Western notions of the kinds of art Latin Americans artist produced. Concha's untitled portrait is exemplary of late 20th century abstraction and the explorative nature of lithography.