José Menéndez and Tatiana Gómez say they fell in love over a letterpress.
“Maybe we had seen each other before, but I think when I really felt like I met her, or I saw her, was through printing and using the letterpress. So yeah, I think that’s how it all started.”
Menéndez, originally from Puerto Rico, and Gómez, originally from Colombia, both moved to Providence to attend the Rhode Island School of Design. The class where they met in 2016, which sounds like something out of the movie version of their story, was called “Hot Printing.” Menéndez was a graduate student teaching the class.
“We just spent our whole winter session doing so much printing, combining all the new technologies, and it was just really fun,” Gómez says, “And all that also started involving just speaking about how these things were made in Latin America and how our different experiences back there, how we knew about all these references.”
Menéndez and Gómez just celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary in March and have created a life in Providence through graphic design, and their company Buena Gráfica.
Buena Gráfica was created in 2021, and in the years since their work can now be seen across the greater Providence area. From the 195 District Park to Farm Fresh, and Providence Preparatory Charter School, their influence on Latin American culture and design has made the pair a unique resource in the area. According to the 2020 Census, Providence’s population is 44.3% Hispanic, the most of any race and origin.
“I think that Providence is, is very Latina,” Menéndez said when we spoke to the couple at their studio, “And I think that we saw, I mean we find ourselves here very comfortable in terms of not just the scale, but also the people and the cultures that are here.”
The design influences behind Buena Gráfica are directly tied to the pair’s research background. Over the last 10 years, they have been collecting posters from across Latin America, documenting the historical and cultural significance of each piece in their research project Gráfica Latina. Their collection was most recently curated as an exhibit at the WaterFire Arts Center titled “Graphic Voices of Latin America”.
"(The show) is a love letter to Latin America. For us, we love this continent. We are from this continent and we’re incredibly interested in learning more about it,” Menéndez says, “We wanted to kind of give people this visual impression of what Latin American looks like through its posters. And you can tell through the messaging, through the way that the posters are made, through the paper, through the different themes you can tell or you can see the kind of variety and the diversity of the continent.”
The exhibit currently includes nearly 200 posters from 16 countries across Latin America, which Gómez says helps portray the unique differences within each country, rather than painting all of Latin America with the same brush.
“We all speak different versions of Spanish all over the place just in that microcosm. But if you just think about how huge Latin America is, it’s just so, so different.” Gómez adds about the collection, “So there’s interesting conversations about (all the) beautiful celebrations that happen, but also referring to issues that are still problematic or (being) addressed right now.”
Both Gómez and Menéndez are quick to acknowledge that they wouldn’t be able to do this much research, teaching, curating, and design if they weren’t doing it together.
Gómez says, “This huge project that runs on two heads and four eyes, it couldn’t happen if we didn’t love each other this much. It’s a lot of work, but I think that we are connected in so many ways and every opportunity that we see, I don’t know, it is just easy.”
Menéndez adds, “We just love each other, but we also love what we do and we love each other. We love what we do and we love making it together. And I just don’t see it otherwise.”
This feature is a part of ART inc.
