Sobreviviente [Survivor]

Primary Juana Alicia (Newark, New Jersey, 1953–Berkeley, California, present)

NationalityAmerican, North America

Date1990

MediumScreenprint

Edition Info8/60

Catalogue raisonnéGuzman, Appendix C: Silk Screen Prints (1983-2003), p.100

DimensionsSheet: 32 1/4 × 26 1/8 in. (81.9 × 66.4 cm)
Image: 29 5/16 × 24 in. (74.4 × 60.9 cm)

Credit LineBlanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of Gilberto Cárdenas, 2017.273

Keywords

Rights Statement

IN COPYRIGHT

Collection AreaPrints and Drawings

Object number2017.273

On View

Not on view

Label Text

Web Comments

Sobreviviente was originally a pastel drawing Juana Alicia intended as a prospective book cover for the 1986 publication The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina. During the Argentine Dirty War (1976–83), thousands of left-wing activists, students, and writers were tortured and killed by the military dictatorship. The book is part testimonial, autobiography, and collective memoir by human rights activist and poet Alicia Partnoy. She was imprisoned for two years, during which Partnoy spent three and a half months blindfolded, forced to navigate the prison camp through rare visual fragments, and heightening her other senses to perceive her incarcerated world. Ultimately, another work served as the publication’s cover image. Juana Alicia later revisited the artwork during her 1990 Self Help Graphics residency. She approached the print with continued reverence, as both a symbol of the prison industrial complex and a reflection of her own sister’s survival through breast cancer.

Exhibitions

Unbreakable: Feminist Visions from the Gilberto Cárdenas and Dolores Garcia Collection