Artist and activist Ester Hernández uses witty appropriations of cultural icons to convey the Chicana experience and advocate for marginalized people, particularly farmworkers. Sun Mad draws on her and her family’s experiences living and working in the San Joaquin Valley. In 1979, the artist learned from her mother that the water in her hometown had been contaminated for decades. Enraged by the unthinkable damage to her family and community, the artist struggled with how to respond.
In 1981, Hernández found the answer in a billboard for Sun Maid, a privately-owned cooperative of raisin growers whose large commercial farms dominated the area where she grew up. Sun Maid’s iconic logo, first introduced in 1916, depicts a smiling white farmworker holding a basket overflowing with juicy green grapes. Hernández transformed this edenic image to convey the harsh realities of farmworker life, replacing the original model with a leering skeleton and underscoring her anger with the altered slogan "Sun Mad Raisins, unnaturally grown with insecticides, miticides, herbicides, fungicides." This powerful critique references the work of Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) who used skeleton figures (sometimes referred to as calaveras) in his dark, satirical images.
This copy of Sun Mad is from the first edition, which was completed and signed in 1982. While Hernández employed master printers for the two subsequent editions (1992 and 2008), she printed the original run herself in her kitchen with only her young son as her assistant. The print has been included in numerous publications and exhibitions, becoming one of the most celebrated images from the Chicanx movement.
Staci Steinberger, Associate Curator, Decorative Arts and Design, 2021
