Ayotzinapa Poster Exhibit Touring the World Gives Voice to Mexico's Missing 43 Students Deborah Vankin - The Los Angeles Times
go to original February 20, 2016

Elaine Raif, left, Pilar Castillo, Daniel Gonzalez, Betty Avila, Carol A. Wells, Debra J.T. Padilla, Marietta Bernstoff and Maria Galicia with posters in the Durón Gallery at the Social and Public Art Resource Center on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles. (Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times)

The poster, rendered in black and gray with a hint of red shows, a school bus disappearing into a dark plume of storm clouds, leaving bloody trails on the road behind it. A second poster depicts a charcoal-drawn skull on burnt notebook paper. Yet another has words etched into sand on a beach, the message as ephemeral as the wind that will blow it away: "Where are the Ayotzinapa students?"

The posters are an outcry by artists from 13 countries in response to the 2014 kidnapping in Iguala, Mexico, of 43 students on their way to a political protest. The government says the 43 young men from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College were rounded up and killed by corrupt local authorities working with a drug cartel; a report by an international human rights group disputes details of the purported massacre. Bodies have not been found, and families of the victims are seeking answers.

Shortly after the students went missing, noted Mexican activist and artist Francisco Toledo sent out a call through museums, universities and cultural organizations for original poster art giving voice to the tragedy. He received more than 700 responses from artists as far-flung as Denmark, Poland, Lebanon, Cuba and Argentina, with the largest number of entries coming from Iran. Forty-three of the posters formed the exhibition "Carteles de Ayotzinapa" at Mexico's Museum of Tolerance. The exhibition, which traveled throughout Mexico and Latin America, now is open in Los Angeles.

Four local arts organizations dedicated to social justice — the Social and Public Art Resource Center, better known as SPARC, plus the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Art Division and Self-Help Graphics & Art — have banded together to bring the exhibition, renamed "Ayotzinapa: A Roar of Silence," to Los Angeles for its U.S. debut this week. It then will move on to the Netherlands and France.

Read the rest and see photo gallery at The Los Angeles Times

Photo: Carlos Carmona Medina, Mexico

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