Jesus Barraza is an activist printmaker based in San Leandro, California. Using bold colors and high contrast images, his prints reflect both his local and global community and their resistance in a struggle to create a new world.

Barraza has worked closely with numerous community organizations to create prints that visualize struggles for immigration rights, housing, education, and international solidarity. In 1998 Barraza was a co-founder of ten12, a collective of digital artists. He has also worked as Graphic Designer for the Mission Cultural Center/Mission Grafica, where Calixto Robles, Juan R. Fuentes and Michael Roman mentored Barraza in various screen printing methods. In 2003, he co-founded the Taller Tupac Amaru printing studio to foster resurgence in the screen printing medium, where completed over 100 prints. Additionally he is a partner at Tumis Inc., a bilingual design studio helping to integrate art with emerging technologies

Printmaking has allowed Barraza to produce relevant images that can be put back into the hands of his community and spread throughout the world. He believes that through this work and the work of Dignidad Rebelde, he is playing a role in keeping the history of graphic art activism alive. He proudly continues the tradition of graphic art in the spirit of Jose Gaudalupe Posada, OSPAAAL and Juan R. Fuentes, whose artwork has been part a pivotal part of social movement (or whose artwork has always been in solidarity with oppressed people of the world). Barraza prides himself on his continued connection to his community and on his availability as an activist artist who can be relied on for help at any time.

Barraza has exhibited at Galeria de la Raza (San Francisco), Museo del Barrio (New York); de Young Museum (San Francisco); Mexican Fine Arts Center (Chicago); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco); and internationally at the House of Love & Dissent (Rome), Parco Museum (Tokyo), and Mexico. He was a 2005 artist-in-residence with Juan R. Fuentes at San Francisco's prestigious de Young Museum, and is a recipient of the "Art is a Hammer" award in 2005 from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.

His Justseeds store page is here.

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