In words by curator Mia Lopez, perhaps Casas's Humanscape series is best encapsulated by ‘Humanscape 63 (Show of Hands),’ which depicts an abstracted film screen showing a grayscale variation of Michelangelo's ‘Creation of Adam.’ In the middle ground, a black anarchist flag opposes a United Farm Workers Flag, an important icon during the Chicano labor movement. The foreground features, from left to right: an arm holding a maraca, a Black Power fist, hands spelling ‘love’ in sign language, a hand holding a joint, and a hand making the ‘OK’ signal, all in varying skin tones. The entire piece is shadowed by the silhouette of a hand giving the middle finger, with the label ‘Show of Hands’ stenciled at the bottom. ‘Humanscape 63’ represents Casas's fragmentation of identity. The forceful hand gestures are undermined by their disembodiment; a violent detachment denies the artist bodily unity, leaving an incomplete self. Still, the many fragments inevitably come together to form a Lacanian illusory self, punctuated by the central defiant gesture of the middle finger. While Casas's power symbols are impotent due to corporeal loss, the middle finger makes a vigorous phallic assertion and successfully reclaims the misappropriated agency. The wordplay and satirical elements in this piece reflect Casas's tongue-in-cheek approach to identity politics. Yet the message is mixed.
While Chicano elements are clear, they are not predominant; rather, the inclusion of so many other ethnic and racial allusions somewhat dilutes the potency of the Chicano symbols. This reflects both Casas's ambiguity about the homogeneity of a single label and the broader political climate at the time. Where other Chicano artists tended to restrict their vision to their sole heritage, Casas contextualized the movement, and by exhibiting its parallels to other political developments, he established a sense of inclusion.”
- Mia Lopez, Hyperallergic


“Humanscape 63 and Humanscape 62 are clear examples of the insider/outsider structure of the Humanscape series. The central cinematic rectangular space in Humanscape 63 provides a dual chromatic and graphic representation of Michelangelo's ‘The Creation of Adam,’ a fresco in the Sistine Chapel where God's outstretched hand almost touches Adam's. The ‘Creation of Adam’ is an iconic painting that signifies Western culture. Within the outer frame in Humanscape 63, Casas provides context for addressing Western culture with an oppositional, contrarian ‘showing of hands.’ Along the bottom of the outer frame, Casas paints a series of hands that signal peace, civil rights, political power, dancing, music, and smoking cigarettes or marijuana. A blank green flag emerges from the lower left corner of the painting, and the United Farm Workers' flag emerges from the lower right. Emerging from the bottom and reaching to the middle of the painting is a shadow of a hand giving the middle finger. This middle finger can be read as challenging the Western canon, both modernity and aesthetic American culture. In Humanscape 63, Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" sits at the center, while the UFW, diverse hand signals, and middle finger sit in the periphery. As Casas stated to Jacinto Quirarte in 1969, Chicano artists straddle two cultures and, like artists, are outsiders.”- Carlos Francisco Jackson, Mel Casas: The Permeable and Porous Borderlands, Iconic Reality

“In Humanscape 63 (1970), subtitled ‘Show of Hands,’ Casas focuses on the symbolic language of hand gestures. Depicted in extreme close-up on the theater screen are two marmoreal hands which pantomime the spark-of-life gesture in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The cast shadow of a third hand, with a single finger raised in an obscene salute, rises at the center of the screen to almost touch Adam's hand. Considered in light of Casas' contemporaneous organization of Con Safo, the reference takes on an anti-establishment context. While issues of race were not an insignificant factor in the exclusion of Con Safo artists from museums and galleries, Casas avoids a frontal assault on solely ethnic grounds and instead attacks what is, for Casas, the core issue: institutional justification of denial of exhibition access on aesthetic grounds. In the Western tradition, Michelangelo's Creation of Adam panel from the Sistine Chapel is one of those rare apogeal works that has come to define, in the common understanding, true art. The Creation panel's powerful focal point is the space between the two reaching hands, through which God sparks life and humanity in the mud-formed Adam. By choosing this work as the basis for his statement, Casas addresses not only antiquated aesthetic criteria but also the ethnocentric yardstick by which humanity has traditionally been measured. In the audience space across the bottom of the canvas, Casas presents a primer of additional signs which suggest additional meanings. He begins at the lower left with the brown hand of an Indian shaking a rattle in protest at the clenched fist of a white supremacist; behind them is the anarchist's black flag. In the center, four hands - black, yellow, brown, and white - spell the word ‘love’ in American Sign Language. The brown hand raises two fingers to depict not only the letter ‘v’ in ‘love’ but also the V-gesture peace sign of the hippie generation. Building on the cultural associations of the peace symbol, Casas places two hands: one male, the other female, at the far right. Each holds an item significant to the ‘Make Love Not War’ movement, specifically, a marijuana joint and a contraceptive pill. A second reference here is to the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War, which culminated in a march in Los Angeles in August of that year. The Brown Berets organized the moratorium to protest the high casualty rate of Chicano soldiers in Vietnam and a military draft that seemed to draw more heavily from the Mexican American than from the Anglo community. Casas, a wounded veteran of Korea and an anti-war activist on principle, expressed his solidarity with the anti-war movement in this painting. In the background, the Chicano Farm Workers Union Flag waves as an emblem of the larger social movement of which the Brown Berets were an important part. Casas adds a pop-culture subtext by letting the third hand, rising from the audience, cast a pall over the hands signing out ‘love’ (Casas personal communication 2003). This ‘bird’ finger gesture, like George Carlin's contemporaneous monologue on the expletive ‘F-- You,’ is emblematic of the political and sexual turmoil that plagued the ‘Free Love Generation.’"- Nancy Kelker, “Mel Casas: Redefining America,” In "Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology."