Carlos Cortez

Artist, poet, printmaker, photographer, songwriter and lifelong political activist. His mother was a German socialist pacifist, and his father was a Mexican Indian organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Carlos was himself a lifelong Wob.

He spent two years in prison for refusing to “shoot at fellow draftees” during World War II. After his incarceration he worked in construction, a food shop and, a chemical factory. He also started drawing cartoons in 1948 for the Industrial Worker. He soon took up linoleum block prints. When the price of linoleum became too steep, Carlos started using wood using old furniture. Carlos later became an accomplished oil and acrylic painter, though he always preferred the woodcuts because they were reproducible and affordable.

When the Industrial Worker switched to offset in the 1960s, Carlos began drawing pen-and-ink cartoons. He has also served as editor of the newspaper and on the union’s General Executive Board, and was one of the IWW’s most popular public speakers. During these years Carlos married Marianna Drogitis, and in 1965 they moved to Chicago where he became involved with the local Mexican and Chicano mural movement.

Inspired above all by the work of José Guadalupe Posada, printmaker of the Mexican Revolution, and the German expressionist Käthe Kollwitz, Carlos blends the techniques and styles of the German expressionists with themes from the ancient Aztecs and modern Chicanos. He made countless images support striking workers, from miners in Bolivia to farm workers in California, though he is best known for large linocut poster-portraits of activists and labor organizers such as Joe Hill, Ricardo Flóres Magón, Lucy Parsons and Ben Fletcher.

In 1985, to commemorate the union’s 80th anniversary, he organised an important exhibition, “Wobbly: 80 Years of Rebel Art,” featuring original works by many IWW cartoonists. and later received many accolades, and it likely  the only IWW artist whose work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

He died in January 2005, in Chicago.