MFA Student Gaby Hurtado-Ramos: Internship in Mexico City and Oaxaca
This summer, printmaking graduate student Gaby Hurtado-Ramos spent a month in Mexico City and Oaxaca visiting independent risograph publishers and print collectives.
Gaby conducted interviews to investigate issues in both self-publishing and collectives. The conversations with risograph publishers focus on the different ways independent publishing functions in Mexico, forms of collaboration and curation, and the importance of self-publishing through zines and other printed matter. Conversations with print collectives focused around each group’s history, the context for why artists form collectives, the importance of feminist spaces, and group decision-making processes. Gaby is in the process of transcribing, editing, and translating interviews to be published in both English and Spanish.
Gaby Hurtado-Ramos is an MFA student at the UT School of Art. They supervise the Letterpress Lab at the school. Gaby is from Houston, Texas and graduated with a BA in Studio Art from Oberlin College in 2016. Shortly after, they moved to Tucson, Arizona to be involved with local efforts in immigration justice. A few years later, Gaby lived in Providence, Rhode Island at the Dirt Palace, a feminist collective arts space. In 2020 Gaby returned to Houston and was a member of Burning Bones Press and subsequently an artist-in-residence at The Printing Museum. There they made letterpress and risograph prints and later continued as a studio member and workshop instructor. While in Houston, Gaby also taught studio art classes at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. Gaby’s work has been exhibited in print and zine expos, festivals, and galleries. Their illustration work has been commissioned by ProPublica, the Highlander Research and Education Center, and the Tucson Jewish Museum.
Images are of:
-SARA, Sociedad Anónima Reproducción Autogestiva, an independent risograph publisher in Mexico City
-The space of Colectivo Subterráneos, a print collective in Oaxaca
-The space of Impresos Mexico, an independent risograph publisher in Mexico City
