Jos Sances - prints and biography

Biography

Jos Sances (b. Boston, Massachusetts) is a printmaker, muralist, and community activist who has spent more than four decades shaping the cultural landscape of the San Francisco Bay Area. Educated at Montserrat School of Visual Art in Beverly, Massachusetts, Sances moved west and quickly became a central figure in community-based printmaking. In 1980, he co-founded Mission Grafica, the printmaking studio at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, where he worked until 1988. In 1989, he established Alliance Graphics, a unionized screenprint shop that continues to serve both artistic and activist communities.

Sances’s work is known for its combination of technical mastery and biting social commentary. He is also a founding and lifelong member of the Great Tortilla Conspiracy, a satirical performance collective that screenprints images—often political and irreverent—onto tortillas using chocolate, creating edible works of art that blur the boundaries between performance, humor, and activism.

Over the years, his prints and murals have earned both critical and institutional recognition. In 2010 and 2016, the Library of Congress acquired nearly 500 of his prints, creating a significant record of his career output. His work has been exhibited widely, including in Committed to Print at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, at La Sorbonne in Paris (2022), and in ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics 1965 to Now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum—where Sances was one of the few non-Chicano artists featured.

Public art remains at the heart of Sances’s practice. He has completed murals at the Oakland Coliseum, tile installations at BART and AMTRAK stations, and collaborative projects with Art Hazelwood at the Castro Valley Library and San Francisco’s Arnett Watson Apartments. His international projects include tile mural workshops in Todos Santos, Mexico, and Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Palestine.

Through his lifelong dedication to socially engaged art, Jos Sances has redefined the possibilities of printmaking and muralism as tools for activism, community, and cross-cultural dialogue.