Francisco Huerta

This exhibit curates seven drawings by Francisco Huerta (un-1943), published in New York Frente Popular in 1938 and in España Libre in 1943. His drawings depict images of the war. Huerta painted dark eyes to portray suffering people.

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Huerta illustrated Lirón's Bombas de Mano (Hand grenades), a collection of satirical poems that mocked fascists and antifascists, published by the Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas (SHC) in 1938. Huerta helped Juan Eugenio Domingo Mingorance paint two murals for the Ateneo Hispano de Nueva York headquarters. One of them, “Éxodo,” depicts refugees walking toward France. 

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Huerta was an actor and stage designer in the SHC antifascist plays. He participated in these two plays:

• In Sept. 1936, Ignacio Zugadi Garmendia’s ¡Milicianos al Frente! (Militiamen to the Front!). The play is situated in the mountains of Guadarrama. A militiaman gives reasons for defending the Republic. In his house in a working-class neighborhood of Madrid, Atilano thinks the people should dismantle the state instead. Leocadia takes a rifle and goes to fight against Fascism.

• In Oct. 1943, Ignacio Zugadi Garmendia's Hombres y Mujeres (Men and Women) was a 3-act comedy about politicians in an imaginary country. The play shows their ambitions and contradictions.
   

Huerta was a member of the Ateneo Hispano de Nueva York. He lived in a rented room in Columbia Heights, in Brooklyn. ​When he died on March 24, 1944, the Ateneo initiated a collection to cover the cost of his funeral. His friend, Sebastian Palmer, wrote Huerta's obituary in España Libre. In it, Palmer remembered him as the actor and stage designer at Ateneo in the 1920s and later at SHC, and also as a cartoonist and contributor to many worker periodicals.