Mesa revealed their new exhibit on October 9, a stirring depiction of the death penalty by Malaquias Montoya, a leading figure in the West Coast Political Chicano Arts movement. Premeditated: Meditations on Capital Punishment will be showcased up until November 6.

Alessandra Moctezuma, Art Gallery Director and Museum Studies Professor, was adamant about getting Montoyas’ collection displayed: “In these times.I think it’s important to be aware of social issues.and how to fight for social reform,” she said.

A short lecture was presented after the unveiling of the new exhibit where Montoya talked about social injustices, his past works, and his inspirations.

Montoya cites his mother as his main inspiration for his works. When he was a child, the walls of his house were adorned with intricate designs printed in beautiful, rich colors. Curious as to how this was possible, seeing as they were so poor, Montoya begged his mother for the secret. His mother would take the crepe paper decorations that were considered trash after dances, and soak them in buckets of cold water to collect the dyes.

“How did you get the prints,” he then asked. It seems his mother would go out on Highway 66, find old tires, and cut shapes out of the lining. She would take the shapes from the rubber and attach them to pieces of cardboard, making printing blocks.

“For me that was amazing,” he says. He lingers on this memory for a few minutes before moving on to his father.

“My mother was an amazing, talented artist.and my father was a chemist. He was.he made whiskey and he did two years in Kansas for making whiskey.”

Montoya is very fond of the memories of his parents, even given the shortcoming of his father. He even went as far as to aggrandize them in a print as they were picking cotton. “At one point, I was made to feel ashamed. When my parents would come in to see the principal.in their dirty work clothes.what a society-that would make one ashamed of their parents.people attributing to the wealth of this country.”

Montoya is surprisingly funny considering how austere and unsettling many of his works are. He is a very eloquent speaker, passionate yet soft-spoken, charming yet humble.

Montoya found himself being drawn to silk-screening for a very simple reason in 1969. “It was 8 to 5, Monday through Friday.” He had found the job in a newspaper. His new employer had informed him that if he would work the first month for free, and had done an adequate job, he could stay on and collect his pay at a later date. “That was alright with me, I was collecting unemployment at the time, so..” Montoya was paid for that first month six months later.

The latter part of his lecture was spent showcasing and describing various political and social fliers that Montoya had worked on in the past. “Most of these fliers were done for no charge. Donations of paint and paper. We took a lot of pride.we were the visual side of these movements.”

Montoya displays a general dislike of authority in his works. One particular poster, Undocumented, depicted an immigrant worker, dying and tangled in a fence of barbed wire. “I would drive in the mornings.and see these workers toiling.. and someone would yell ‘Le Migra’, just to see them flee.” Immigration officers were making sport of watching undocumented workers flee, like animals, and often times this cruel practice resulted in death.

Blind Patriotism is a piece Montoya conceived after leaving a supermarket, of all places. Upon his exit, a veteran who was missing an arm, asking him if he would like to purchase a pencil or American flag pin, approached him. “I wondered what this man felt about this, about where his country has placed him, so I asked.” The man hit the table in front of him, hard, and responded “I’d lose this other friggin’ arm for this country.”

The resulting visuals are jarring to say the least. In it, a man, presumably a soldier, but possibly just a civilian, is wrapped in an American flag and tied to a chair, with a Purple Heart in front of him.

While many of his pieces may be deemed controversial, Montoya doesn’t fret about the backlash. “My work is not going to do anything.after people leave the show.they tune into some television, or some stupid music. They’re not going to do anything. If there were more people who had the courage to bring works like this.it would be a different story.”

Montoya didn’t sell his work early in his career to make extra money. He would make calendars of four prints and a cover and sold them for twenty-five dollars to people in coffee shops. He would also go door to door, discussing these works with people who didn’t generally go to galleries, and eventually people started calling him to ask about them, and telling him that he was selling entirely too cheap.

“I would try to sell them to my peers on E. 14th Street, and they would say ‘you’re crazy, I can get a calendar for three dollars, why would I want this?”

Premeditated consists of 21 pieces displayed in The Mesa College Art Gallery. The pieces range in sub-topics from the execution of the mentally ill to the use of medical personnel to kill people. Several pieces are accompanied by text to further communicate the image.

According to the introduction Malaquias wrote for his exhibit, he was inspired to create these works by the 2000 presidential election, combined with the execution of Mumia Abu Jamal, a man who was sentenced to death with a degree of uncertainty behind his conviction.

“I have always been against the death penalty,” the introduction states, “it is an irrational idea to kill a person because they have killed another.revenge seems too infantile a way of settling a dilemma.”

Malaquias is offering several portfolios of Premeditated, consisting of twelve 20″ by 30″ original and silkscreen prints for the price of $3000. A third of this price from each portfolio sold will go directly to Death Penalty Focus, a California non-profit organization working towards the abolition of capital punishment.