José Francisco Borges (b.1935)

José Francisco Borges (b. 1935) is the most famous Brazilian folk artists. The woodblock prints of northeast Brazil began as an offshoot of a folk art known as literatura de cordel, or string literature. These were cheap printed pamphlets of folk poetry which were hung for sale from lines of string. The woodcuts started out as illustrations for these pamphlets, but then became popular in their own right, and the work got bigger. Borges refused to limit or number the editions of his prints, keeping them affordable and very much for the masses.