Esperanza

Esperanza means 'hope' in Spanish, and the title may also refer to one of several towns of that name in Mexico and Central America that Summers visited during the journeys that fed his Latin American subjects of the 1970s. The 1978 print belongs to the closing phase of a decade in which he had moved between Native American historical motifs, Mexican volcanoes, and coastal scenes, all rendered through the same procedure: blocks inked individually, paper laid face-down, pigment pressed through from the reverse so that each color bleeds outward into the washi rather than terminating at the cut edge. The bleed gives the image its characteristic luminosity — ridges and skies behave as light rather than as line. Whether read as a place name or as the abstract noun, Esperanza signals the contemplative register that the Latin American landscapes increasingly assumed toward the end of the 1970s. It sits in the same line of work as Volcán Fuego and the Mexican-coast prints, treating geography less as record than as a vehicle for radiance.