".......REVIEWS..."

Committed To Print
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988

Mission Grafica is the graphics workshop of the Mission Cultural Center, founded in San Francisco's predominantly Hispanic Mission District in 1976. The workshop has been co directed by Jos Sances and Rene Castro since 1981 and has served many community and political groups.

Sances's silkscreen was done for a San Francisco gay activist group, the Ad Hoc Committee, to be used during demonstrations protesting the parole of Dan White. A former city supervisor, White was released in January 1984 after serving just over five years in prison for the murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in November 1978, inside City Hall. The figural shape wrapped in newspaper at the center of the print is a reference to a portrait bust of Moscone by Robert Arneson. That sculpture, commissioned for the Moscone Convention Center, made graphic reference to the mayor's murder and was ultimately rejected. In this print, newspaper accounts of the rejection controversy form the bust's ominous shroud. The background is made up of packages of Twinkies, one of the junk foods that the defense cited in its claim that White's ability to reason had been impaired by his unnourishing diet.

Dan White Released
(1984) Silkscreen, 35 x 23 1/8


The Charlotte Observer
August, 1990


Jos Sances:
The Republican
Years
by Belle Gironda


Art with a political and social agenda has never truly penetrated the American mainstream. The reasons are obvious. Political art is not commercially viable, and there has been little public money for It since the WPA of the thirtiesñunless you want to talk about NEA grants, which currently come with strings attached. In screen printing, Jos Sances has found a conduit to challenge this predicament.

The Republican Years, A Ten Year Retrospective of Screen Prints by Jos Sances, at Spirit Square through August 19, is about challenge. Sances' work attacks the value systems that promote racism and other phobias, the corruption of religion, censorship and right wing politicsñfor starters. His knack for powerful imagery and economical use of language could earn him a fortune in advertising. Thankfully, Sances has chosen to lend his gifts to other causes. Not associated with any particular organization, Sances seems, like Tom Jode, to be "wherever there is injustice.

Coming from a Northeastern art school background, Sances went through an abstract expressionist phase, but he grew dissatisfied with working in a realm he considered limiting. He began screen printing in the late seventies white living in Modesto California. He held a series of art related jobs like sign painting, car painting and tee shirt painting. This work, he says, sharpened the precision (and speed) with which he made images. During this period, he also began making his own hand painted screens. Later, the skills he developed during this period allowed him to put out "cause" posters at a moments notice without sacrificing his standards.

The polemical force behind The Republican Years operates on many levels. Nothing is predictable or trite in Sances work, yet his message is always accessible. Sometimes he goes way out on a limb as in his poster for The Funny Show, which attacks the commercialism of the Catholic church. In this piece, the Pope sells "The Lord's Prayer" to Colonel Sanders, who outbids Wonder Bread. Piss Helms depicts a Mapplethorpian male figure giving Jesse a dose of what pisses him off.


In other posters, Sances cuts quietly to the heart of the matter. After 30 Years of Teaching Is This Her Reward? appears in block letters across the top of a poster for the California teacher's association. Pictured is a lone haggard woman seated at a table in a bare room, her hands folded around a cup of coffee. Below is the information: "Retired teachers do not receive Social Security, Medicare, Employer Pension or Payment of Medical Dental Insurance Premiums. They get a monthly state pension, yet it could not cover the cost of even one day in the hospital."

This poster is enhanced by the incredible artfulness of Sances' printing. The textures of the woman's sweater, skin, hair, the table surface, the curtains at the window and the linoleum on the floor are distinct. Sances achieves this effect using "hand color separation." Beginning with photographs, he hand details and/or scratches out portions of each separation. The result is an image which looks too dreamy to be photographic and too detailed/realistic to be a straight print. Our eyes are drawn to the image; we are struck by the message.

Sometimes, Sances conveys a subtle irony without words. In three vertical film like frames, his Reagan Assassination depicts the President waving, the President struck by the bullet, and then the President with stars for eyes. We are reminded silently, cynically what a coup that was.

Robert Oppenheimer works in much the same way. This print shows a mild mannered man in a suit and tie standing before a blackboard. Across the board are scrawled a series of equations and the word "theoretical." The shadow of the pullstring for a map falls on the board. This image is somehow more chilling than all the mushroom clouds I have seen.

The Republican Years is a great retrospective in the way it leafs through the issues of the eighties and highlights the transgressions of our national power structure ñlest we forgetñas it seems we do so easily. After viewing Jos Sances' work, it's easy to see why governments with something to hide fear artists with a voice.

Oakland Tribune - August 7, 1992

by Chiori Santiago


Posters as information, as reflection, as a forum are the subject of "Neo Didactic: Long-Winded Prints and Posters" by Jos Sances at the Berkeley Store Gallery through Aug. 16.

Sances is a high priest of silkscreen printing in the Bay Area; he was primarily responsible for the distinctive look of Mission Grafica's commercial posters before he turned to his own work in 1988.

He's also a tireless crusader for human rights and against governmental oppression, but as the show's title demonstrates, he avoids taking his own rap too seriously. Some of his "visual propaganda'' is heavy handed, such as "El Salvador," depicting George Bush as Latin America's saviour in a limoña fairly obvious image. But there's a large dose of humor and self assessment here, too, conveyed with striking technique that pushes the standards of both silkscreen and political postering.

Three large black and white prints (they resemble etchings) are art history take offs that comment on current crises. "The Aluminum Harvester" pairs a classic Millet image with a shopping cart, emptiness with bounty. In "Smell the Coffee," the artist is beset by a Pandora's Box of troubles. The frightening figures are rendered in delicate, ghostly line, a remarkable accomplishment for the medium.

To his commercial posters, Sances brings a painterly love of surface. Most effective is a portrait of Waldo Salt which looks literally built of layers of fine line and color. It transforms an otherwlse mundane image, giving it a depth that couldn't be accomplished in a photo.




Artweek June, 1992

A conversation with Jos Sances
by Merideth Tromble

As art historian Tim Drescher tells the story, when Jos Sances moved to the Bay Area in 1981 rumors of his screen printing talents spread quickly through the community poster movement. Sances, whose politics were radicalized by the Vietnam War and whose skills were sharpened by work in commercial print shops, found a place among the activists at the Mission Cultural Center. He and Rene Castro co founded Mission Grafica a community print shop, where Sances worked until he set up his own shop in Berkeley in 1988.

Artweek Aluminum Harvesters, one of the prints you made for the Berkeley Art Center portfolio, reminded me of both van Gogh's drawing style and his paintings of peasants.

Jos Sances It actually is from Millet's Sower. I did a series of prints that were remakes of pre Impressionist art. In the original works, the artists were showing the shock of the Industrial Revolution. Overnight, society turned from agricultural to industrial, and urban problems began. Looking at those pictures of peasants, their morbid condition looked very much to me like people now, as the industrial age Gives way to the information age. The sower sowing fields that he won't profit from was easy to translate into a person with a shopping cart collecting aluminum cans to make some kind of bare subsistence. There's heroic quality in Millet's piece that I tried to get. It's a heroic act to struggle against an environment that's overwhelmingly difficult and still continue to pick up the fucking cans.

AW There's a sense in which you and your colleagues in political art have continued to pick up the cans. Despite the trend to the right in national politics, you seem optimistic about the impact of your work when you write that "This resistance to the Republican rule has done much good l believe, by preventing many bad situations from being much worse. "

JS If nothing else, artists of conscience have kept alive the notion that the situation is not acceptable. If only ten percent of the population accepts that message, it's still enough to keep the flicker of hope alive. People say you're just making art that preaches to the converted. I say that's bullshitñeveryone makes art that preaches to the converted. People who are interested in progressive social change are a small group, and they need encouragement. When you see graphics or art that reinforces your beliefs, it's a really positive thing.

AW I was surprised to learn that after years of intense work for community and political causes you don't be/ong to any particular political group.

JS Most leftist groups are so dogmatic and inflexible that I wouldn't last long, because I'm neither. It would just be a matter of time before I was ejected. That doesn't mean that I don't support them, because I do. I support plurality, but other than working for Alliance Graphics I don't belong to any political doctrine.

AW What is Alliance Graphics?

JS It's a branch of the Middle East Children's Alliance, a humanitarian group. I had been doing graphic work for them, and they asked if I was interested in setting up a T shirt shop to generate funds. There's now four of us who work as a collective. We drew up a union contract. The pay is good and for the first time ever I have health care, a pension, and can put a union bug on things, which is really wonderful. The thing I like most is that profits from the businessñwe're actually beginning to show a profit go to an organization that I care deeply about. It was what we tried to do at the Mission Cultural Center. It extends the degree of autonomy. All during those years I didn't give a shit what the National Endowment for the Arts said about anything I did. I think censorship of the arts is just going to get worse.

AW After you were mugged at gunpoint in front of your home, you made a print about the attack called Nightmare. Despite the personal horror of tie assault, the print relates it to a politiacl cause, the government's handling of the 'drug war.''

JS For everything that occurs that seems outrageous and horrible there's a bunch of complicated causes. I think that successfulñand I hate the termñ'political art' understands the complexities behind the issues. It doesn't just make reactionary statements.

AW By reactionary you mean responsive?

JS Responsive in a thoughtless manner.

AW Not necessarily right wing?

JS No. There's just as many left wing reactionariesñmaybe more. Ten years later, the work seems a little ridiculous if it doesn't address the complexities behind the issues. After a certain amount of time you realize that the same issues keep repeating. They just take different forms. But for artists who work the way I do, it's a responsibility to come up with new stuff so that we don't look like we're still making sixties posters. Political posters and community posters are so much more sophisticated now. We've made a quantum leap in thirty years. I sometimes think about making a clenched fist poster just for old times sake, to see if I could make it better.

AW What are some of your particular contributions to that quantum leap?

JS Blurring the line between photograph and drawing. Starting with the original photo stencil, I draw from it, draw over it, draw onto it. I can create manual color separations that are fairly believable. And I've made color more sophisticated. A lot of screen printing is primary and flat, with opaque color. That's one of the advantages of the mediumñthe ink is so dense you can put yellow on top of black and have it read as bright yellow. But I use a lot of transparent color, glazing with color, more like traditional painting. That had not been done, but I'm starting to see transparent ink in other people's work.
Photo stencils are a World War II offshoot, so it's pretty new stuff. It's going on hot and heavy here and there's a bunch of us who are looking at each other's things and feeding on them. I think that's a great situation for an art form. When you start to think, a guy like Andy Warhol, a screen printer, runs the risk of being one of the most important artists of the century. So I think it's logical that people would be interested in the medium.

AW You've contributed to the growth of a local audience for screenprinting by teaching numerous workshops and classes. Your teaching includes four years working with inmates at the San Francisco Countty Jail. How did that experience affect you?

JS It was an enormously frustrating job. By the time a person gets to that institution the odds of rehabilitation are really low. You're watching the beginning of a career of institutionalization, and the weight of that tragedy on me was enormous. Clearly art offered no alternative but it was an escape. Over and over again, inmates told me that coming to the art room was almost like being outside. That relief was probably the best thing I could offer. People get to the point in our culture where they don't see incarceration as a punishment, but it's brutal punishment. I removes somebody and isolates them in a terrible condition, overcrowded with a bunch of other equally criminal people. It's not exactly a ticket to change.

AW Teaching in a prison instead of an art school is just one of the ways you've made a career outside of the formal art system. Your prints are distributed by the organizations who commission them, not galleries. Do you see this as an advantage?

JS One of the things I haven't said is that I'm an artist of privilege. Through luck or natural occurrences, I ended up in a situation where I can make the kind of art that I really do want to make. I can survive at it, and I can call my own shots. To a degree this has been delivered to me from years of working as a community artist for next to nothing. While I was at Mission Grafica I made $400 a month. But the rewards were enormous. People think political art is dull and angry but it actually was fun. And I think that's something artists need to look at. I get paid really well for what I do and not necessarily all the time financially.