Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP)

Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), Mexican artists' collaborative. Founded in 1937 by Leopoldo Méndez, Luis Arenal, and Pablo O'Higgins, this popular graphics workshop is a center for the collective production of art with sociopolitical content. Sharing the post-Revolutionary idealism of the Mexican muralists, the TGP aimed to reach as broad an audience as possible, primarily through the dissemination of inexpensive wood- and linoleum-block prints. Although still extant in the early 2000s, the collaborative was most prominent in the 1930s and 1940s, an era when populist struggles reached their apogee worldwide. In this period it published over 45,000 prints, including posters, broadsheets, and portfolios; these works became known internationally through exhibitions. The TGP, which attracted such artists as Mexicans Raúl Anguiano, Alberto Beltrán, José Chávez Morado, and Alfredo Zalce, and Americans Elizabeth Catlett and Mariana Yampolsky, became a center for preservation of Mexico's strong tradition in the graphic arts.

See alsoArt: The Twentieth Century; O'Higgins, Pablo.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hannes Meyer, ed., El Taller de Gráfica Popular (1949).

Judith Keller, El Taller de Gráfica Popular (1985).

Museo De Palacio De Bellas Artes, Museo Nacional De La Estampa, and Galería Jose Velasco, 50 años Taller de Gráfica Popular (1987).

Dawn Ades, "The Taller de Gráfica Popular," in Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820–1980 (1989).

Additional Bibliography

60 años TGP: Taller de Gráfica Popular. México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1997.

Ittman, John W., Innis H. Shoemaker, and others. Mexico and Modern Printmaking: A Revolution in the Graphic Arts, 1920 to 1950. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Antonio, TX: McNay Art Museum; New Haven, CT: in association with Yale University Press, 2006.

Prignitz-Poda, Helga. El Taller de Gráfica Popular en México, 1937–1977. México: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1992.

                                      Elizabeth Ferrer