In Latin America there is a longand storied tradition of poster making. From the populist broadsides of JoséGuadalupe Posada to the political imagery of the Cuban revolution, from theChicano movement born in the sixties to the everyday world of the barrio,posters communicate the needs, the joys, and the debates of the people.
 
Luis Fitch, raised in Tijuana,Mexico, creates art is both interdisciplinary and deeply cross-cultural. Hisposters speak to both Latinos and Anglos, to young and old, to hip and square,to rural and urban, to the street and to the board room. His work referencesand modernizes Mexican cultural history even as it communicates contemporaryMinnesotan Latino community life. His art bridges the distance between theovertly commercial and the quietly nostalgic. And when Fitch strikes out in apolitical direction, he creates work that is both ironic and refreshinglyhumorous.
 
Fitch has centered much of hisposter work on the Minneapolis Latino merchant collective, Mercado Central. Fortheir celebrations of such cultural institutions as Día de los Muertos (Day ofthe Dead), Día del Niño (Day of the Children), Mexican Independence Day, andthe Virgin of Guadalupe, he has created brightly colored, ethnically dense, andhistorically shaded art -art meant for store windows, street corners, culturalcenters, and people's homes.
 
For the last ten years, Fitch hasalso done significant work with Grupo Soap del Corazón, a Latino artists' crewbased in Minnesota. For their 2001 exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute ofArt, he created a Mexican wrestling poster, complete with artists dressed asMexican Luchadores costumes/masks and positioned in a menacing manner. Hiswrestling/art message encapsulated his ability to provocatively position both"low culture" and "high culture" in the same crucible.Correspondingly, the show brought in record numbers of attendees; among themboth recent immigrants from Lake Street of Minneapolis and hard core art worlddenizens. 
 
Luis Fitch is also the creativedirector for UNO Hispanic Branding. In that role, he helps his clientsunderstand consumers on preference factors like language, traditions, holidays,food, religion, heroes, music and art. In a poster he did for a Mervyn’scelebration of Mexican food, music, and handicrafts, he used color, type, andicon to create a feeling of both celebration and familiarity for theneighborhood event. He thereby helped a rather large corporation successfullyextend itself to a grass-roots level of participation in the region, always apublic relations goal.
 
Douglas Padilla
curator, artist and culturalactivist