Carlos Cortéz never owned a car, so it’s not hard to find someone in Pilsen who once drove Carlos Cortéz somewhere in Chicago, to an art fair or a strike rally. He would be 100 right now, but he died at 81 in 2005. In the obituary that ran in this newspaper, it was noted Cortéz had to be talked into buying a house by his wife. To an extreme extent, he refused to feed a capitalist system that cheated ordinary people out of a living wage. He left Milwaukee and moved to Chicago in the 1960s, and kept a Chicago factory job the entire time. But he was primarily known as an artist and activist.
Or was that, activist and artist?
The National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen has a show that spotlights some of his art, celebrates his activism and shows off his influence; at least half the exhibit is dominated by work made by local artists Cortéz influenced and inspired. Still, as you enter, in the middle of the gallery, at its physical heart, there is a large wall of the wood carvings Cortéz printed from, his preferred medium for making art. There are also three paintings, but the problem with painting, he felt, was its rarity: If you paint an image, there is just one of that thing, which means, if popular, it gets pricey.
So Cortéz could print an unlimited number of copies of his wood carvings.
Wait, I asked curator Cesáreo Moreno, had he never heard of Warhol?
Of course, he said, but Cortéz, unlike Warhol — whose limited prints have sold for as much as $105 million — would not limit or number prints. In fact, before Cortéz died, Moreno said, he willed his wood carvings and personal effects to the museum with a single stipulation: Should Cortéz’s art ever attract collectors, they must print more of it.
And so, before the show opened last year, they printed 300 copies of three carvings; at least a third of those are still for sale at the museum’s online gift shop, at $100 a pop. Initially, Moreno wanted to scan Cortéz’s prints and then digitally cut new copies to the proper specifications, but the printmaking collective handling the job, Instituto Grafico de Chicago, told Moreno that if they didn’t go through the physical work of screen-printing fresh copies from the original wood carvings, Cortéz would be rolling over in his grave.
“The irony is, Carlos is starting to sell,” Moreno said. “Not like Warhol, but it’s happening.”
And not hard to imagine.
The work is accessible, righteous, often charming; the name alone — Carlos Cortéz — slides off the tongue; and his image feels ready for the shorthand iconography of museum gift shops. He favored cowboy hats, sombreros and bolo ties, and long curlicues of beard drifted off his face like smoke. Cortéz, for lack of a better way of saying it, resembled an aging hipster. In a video appreciation being shown in the gallery, Sandra Cisneros compares him to a wiggly beef jerky.
“Yet the beauty of him,” Moreno said, “was that he was who he said he was. Artists may hate capitalism then have no problem painting a wealthy person with money to pay them, and Carlos was never that. Not many people are. He would stick to his guns and live what he preached.”
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The subjects of his carvings can be divided into groups: Celebrations of Mexican life and Indigenous traditions; portraits of labor activists; and snapshots of everyday workers, barkeeps and field workers. There are broad hugs of cultural togetherness (“My history is your history”) and darker protests of police abuse. In 1968, during the violence at the Democratic National Convention in Grant Park, he passed out prints of a man being beaten by police officers; he named it “We Serve and Protect.” Also tucked into the carvings is the view from a prison bunk.
That was Cortéz’s view for 18 months.
He refused to fight during World War II; he said that he didn’t want to be unleashed to kill another common man and was sent to a Minnesota jail as a conscientious objector. There, he often recounted, he heard howls of wolves outside the prison, which is why, years later when he moved to Chicago, he would add Koyokuikatl, the Nahuatl word for wolf song, to his surname.
Still, he didn’t entirely dig into his Mexican heritage until moving to Chicago, Moreno said. His father was Mexican, his mother German; they met outside a Wisconsin meeting of the Socialist Party of America. His art reflected that math, pairing moody German expressionism with Mexican politics. Before leaving for Chicago at 42, he was a cartoonist for the Industrial Workers of the World’s union paper, with “beatnik poetry aspirations,” Moreno said. His politics and poetry — “that was his real identity for years.” When he reached Chicago, he found himself steeped in the new Chicano Art Movement, and became an elder of sorts to Vietnam protestors in Chicago impressed by his time as a conscientious objector during a world war that supposedly everyone agreed on.
The exhibit features photographs of Cortéz at protests in Pilsen and Daley Plaza, and sitting alongside Studs Terkel at a May Day rally. He became so ubiquitous around Pilsen that Moreno was shocked when, in the late 1990s, the museum had a show of Cortéz’s art and few attended. “I would feel so bad, because there was Carlos, a couple of times a week, sitting at a table in his gallery, carving out new blocks of wood, and maybe because it was summer, nobody came by.”
Perhaps everyone already knew him and the work. His murals were all over Pilsen. (Today, only one, at 18th Street and Western Avenue, hasn’t been painted over.) His prints were common sights on brick walls. The man himself was a fixture of local festivals and art fairs, where he sold work. He would ask for $20, but if you didn’t have cash, he was known for just giving the print anyway — especially if it was a portrait of a socialist activist like Eugene Debs or Lucy Parsons.
He rarely made money on his art, but that was never the goal, Moreno said. It’s why he never left factory work. “He didn’t want to be a star. He just wanted the message clear — unmissable.”
“Carlos Cortéz 100 Años” is showing through Feb. 18 at the Rubin and Paula Torres Gallery at the National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St.; more information at nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org