Rafael Tufiño: Champion of Puerto Rican Printmaking and Figurative Art.

Of Puerto Rican descent, he came to the island as a child and began his art training with Alejandro Sánchez Felipe and Juan Rosado. He later studied printmaking and mural techniques at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico. In 1950, he co-founded the Center for Puerto Rican Art and created his monumental painting La Plena (1952–1954), which was long displayed at the Fine Arts Center in Santurce and now hangs in the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. From 1952 to 1967 he worked at the Printmaking Workshop of the Community Education Division and later founded the Puerto Rican Workshop (Taller Boricua) in New York (1970–1974). He received numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954, which enabled him to produce the portfolio El Café—the first portfolio in Puerto Rico created by a single artist—the National Culture Award of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in 1987, and in 2013, New York City named 103rd Street in Harlem “Rafael Tufiño Way.” A tireless creator, Tufiño was a leading figure in Puerto Rican printmaking. While he favored a figurative style, he also explored abstraction, always with careful attention to design and harmony among the visual elements in his work.