New York, NY, January 20, 2001--- As part of the Focos series highlighting the contributions of mature artists, El Museo del Barrio is pleased to present this recent suite of prints by Antonio Frasconi, the celebrated artist and internationally-recognized master of the woodcut medium. Organized by Fatima Bercht, Chief Curator, El Museo del Barrio, Let America Be America Again consists of Langston Hughes' poem of the same title, 32 woodcut and relief prints by Frasconi, and a foreword to the portfolio project written by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Chair of Harvard University's Afro-American Studies Department. This exhibition opens in February, in celebration of Black History Month.

Frasconi's woodcut illustrations and sophisticated design deftly complement Hughes eloquent words. Informal typeface used for Hughes' poem is, at times, overlaid directly onto images; other times, it stands alone. The striking images, many in vivid colors and others in black and white, form a seamless whole with the text, offering the viewer a powerful and memorable experience.

It is not surprising that Frasconi would illustrate this poem by Langston Hughes. A pioneer in the use of the graphic medium to explore social and political issues, Frasconi has always focused on humanitarian themes in a quest to achieve justice and equality. The portfolio images are exuberant, bold, and frequently witty, demonstrating Frasconi's unique talent to mine the interplay between words and images.

His works have touched upon war, death, and inhumanity in works such as Los Infrahumanos [The Subhumans] (1945), Bertolt Brecht's Das Lied vom Sa-Mann [Song of the Storm Trooper] (1961), Viet Nam (1967), Los Desaparecidos [The Disappeared] (1984), and The Enduring Struggle (1991). Frasconi also created many works that were intertwined with the literary world, as in a small format series of literary portraits he created of Poe, Whitman and Thoreau between 1959 and 1965 with the Spiral Press. He illustrated fables on his own and for the Twelve Fables of Aesop, and delightful images for the famed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's Bestiary/Bestiario. His charming multilingual children's books, published in the 1950s with Harcourt Brace and Company, helped a generation of children to hone their international language skills.

Antonio Frasconi was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1919 to Italian parents. His family moved to Montevideo, Uruguay, shortly after his birth. He exhibited his work in Montevideo while working as a political cartoonist for the weeklies Marcha and La Linea Maginot. He came to the United States in 1945 on a scholarship from the Art Students League of New York. Soon after, his talent became widely recognized and in 1946, he exhibited his woodcuts at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum. He began his teaching career at The New School in New York City, and more exhibitions and book projects followed in rapid succession, continuing on through the present day.

Among his many awards and honors are: a 1953 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to illustrate poetry by Federico García Lorca; the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival in 1960 for a film using more than 100 woodcuts; the State University of New York Distinguished Teaching Award in 1986; the 1989 Annual Children's Literature Author and Artist Award from the Library of Congress Children's Literature Center; the prestigious Governor's Arts Award in 1998 from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts; and the 1998 Lee Krasner Award, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

The artist has had numerous international exhibitions in the United States, Uruguay, Italy, and Norway. He is represented in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris, and the Permanent Collection of El Museo del Barrio.

Antonio Frasconi is currently the Distinguished Professor of Visual Arts in the School of Art and Design at Purchase College, the State University of New York, where he has taught since 1980. He resides in Connecticut.

This project was generously funded by the Jerome Foundation.

The mission of El Museo del Barrio is to establish a forum that will preserve and project the cultural heritage of Puerto Ricans and all Latin Americans in the United States.

Museum hours: Wed. through Sun. 11 to 5 p.m. Suggested contribution: $4 adults; $2 students and seniors; children under twelve accompanied by adults and members enter free.

El Museo del Barrio may be reached by subway: #6 to 103rd Street station; or by bus: M1, M3, M4 on Madison and Fifth Avenues to 104th Street; local cross-town service between Yorkville or East Harlem and the Upper West Side in Manhattan M96 and M106 or M2.