Luis Jiménez (American, 1940-2007), Tan Lejos de Dios; Tan Cercas de los Estados Unidos (So Far from God; So Close to the United States), 2001, Lithograph, 32 x 57, Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections, Purchased with funds from the Kay Reynolds Stroud Art Fund, 2007.6.

Winslow Homer, Rebel Soldiers, Cover of Harper's Weekly, 1862.

Robert Indiana (American, b. 1928), The Confederacy: Mississippi, 1971, screenprint on paper, 38-3/16 x 31-3/16", Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections, Gift of the American Republic Insurance Company, 1972.8.

Des Moines Art Center
on Grand
4700 Grand Avenue
Des Moines
515-277-4405
Pressing Issues
January 11-April 27, 2008

As the 2008 U.S. presidential nomination process moves into high gear, and as American politicians set out their plans for solving issues that trouble the nation and the world, the Des Moines Art Center presents an exhibition of prints by artists from the 17th to 21st centuries who confronted some of the burning political issues and social challenges of their times. Their attitudes ranged from disengaged reporting to impassioned advocacy. Artists, and the problems they explored, include William Hogarth on human cruelty, Winslow Homer on slavery and secession, George Grosz on war profiteering, Käthe Kollwitz on elderly suicide, Robert Indiana on segregation, Nancy Spero on abortion rights, and Luis Jiménez on U.S.-Mexican border controls and illegal immigration. Many of the problems these artists confront in their works are still strikingly relevant today. Drawn from the permanent collections, Pressing Issues is organized by Amy N. Worthen, curator of prints.

Contemporary printmakers in the exhibition Include:
Luis Alfonso Jiménez Jr. (born El Paso, Texas, July 30, 1940) grew up in the city's Segundo Barrio neighborhood. His grandfather had been a glassblower in Mexico, and his undocumented immigrant father, Luis Sr., ran a sign shop and had hoped to become a professional artist himself

The large-scale public sculptures of American artist Luis Jiménez (1940–2006) — mythical, violent, political, garish, sexy, fun, and often profound — reflected their maker's vision of Mexican-American culture and his often critical views of the wider Southwestern and American cultures in which Mexican Americans live.

Jiménez worked in the industrial, unabashedly commercial medium of fiberglass, and he drew on such commonplace art traditions as Mexican wall calendar prints, cowboy imagery, and "lowrider" truck decoration. Yet his work reflected a detailed knowledge of Mexican and European artistic traditions. He made sculptures for public places, intended to be seen and understood by the thousands of ordinary people, in many cases of Latino descent, who would pass by them every day, yet he also had a strong following among sophisticated art collectors. Jiménez's art had many aspects, but perhaps its most distinctive characteristic was the way it was structured to appeal to a variety of audiences. "My working-class roots have a lot to do with it; I want to create a popular art that ordinary people can relate to as well as people who have degrees in art," Jiménez explained to Chiori Santiago of Smithsonian . "That doesn't mean it has to be watered down. My philosophy is to create a multilayered piece, like [novelist Ernest] Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea . The first time I read it, it was an exciting adventure story about fishing. The last time, I was deeply moved."

Robert Indiana — Born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana, in 1928, he adopted the name of his native state as a pseudonymous surname early in his career. During his typically Midwestern boyhood, highway signs had a symbolic importance for him. His father worked for Phillips 66 gas and, when he left his wife and son, he did so down Route #66. And the diner which his mother subsequently operated had the familiar "EAT" sign looming overhead.

Indiana studied first at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and then at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica, New York. From there he went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he received a degree in 1953 and won a traveling fellowship to Europe. In 1954, he attended Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.

Back in America, Indiana settled in the historic Coentes Slip area on the New York waterfront in 1956 and showed his first hard-edged paintings the following year. From the start he worked with bold, contrasting, sometimes clashing, colors that mirror familiar signs along the highways.

A moralist at heart and an admirer of Longfellow, Whitman and Melville, Indiana often wryly prods his viewers. In a billboard4ike triptych dedicated to Melville, for example, he reminds them of Manhattan's past and suggests they walk around the island-city. He also feels a strong kinship with such earlier precisionist painters as Charles Demuth and showed his admiration in The Demuth American Dream No.5 (1963, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto). Although painted in Indiana's own idiom, it was clearly inspired by Demuth's well-known I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928, Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Frank Moore (American, 1953-2002), Prairie, from 3 Landscapes, 1999, Color woodcut, wood engraving, photoengraving, 13 x 18", Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections, Gift of the Gesso Foundation, 2007.10.1.