Prayer and Struggle

About the Work

Modern plates are made of aluminum and are sensitized with a diazo coating by the manufacturer. Positive-acting plates capture the image drawn on mylar or photographic transparency directly, with no reversal; negative-acting plates capture the image drawn on mylar or photographic transparency indirectly. As seen in Juan Sanchez's offset lithograph Prayer and Struggle, 1990, the detail capability of these plates captures the finest of line work, wash drawing, and photographic image—a real advantage for the artist printmaker. Sánchez is a Nuyorican (a Puerto Rican living in the United States, particularly in New York City) artist whose work frequently incorporates family, politics, and religion. In his signature collage-like style, the offset lithograph Prayer and Struggle depicts a mother's handwritten prayer pleading for the safety of her son, framed by scrapbook cutouts of children in the Puerto Rican Day Parade, a xerox of Ramón Frade's El Pan Nuestro with a jibaro (subsistence farmer) carrying plantains, and an upside-down bald eagle. Sánchez set these objects against a vibrant golden and vermillion background with Sacred Heart imagery alluding to poverty, displacement, and unfreedom. "Confronting the fragmentation of his culture by imperialism and dispersion," critic Lucy Lippard wrote, "Sánchez lovingly weaves his fragments into a new fabric that is both spiritually restorative and politically radical.”
_{—Adapted from Tatiana Reinoza, PhD, from All My Ancestors: The Spiritual in Afro-Latinx Art (2022) exhibition catalog and "Fresh, Human and Personal: Signature of Brandywine Workshop," Three Decades of American Printmaking: The Brandywine Workshop Collection (Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 2004)}