An LA Chicano artist's best friend: Chon Noriega

[Photo is the cover of the October 2011 issue of Artforum Magazine]

Having lived in SoCal for several years now, I have gained a respect for UCLA professor Chon Noriega. Along with his minions, he has done an incredible job of promoting Southern California Chicano artists. Here are a few examples:

1) Helped gain exhibitions at major galleries including LACMA, the Autry, UCLA and the Getty (at the biggies not just the small barrio galleries)

2) Coordinated or created compelling articles and books on local artists (quite a few... not just a couple)

3) Promoted artists in important publications like the SF Chronicle, LA Times, Artforum, NY Times, etc. (he is a promoter)

4) Held panels and events that highlighted Chicano artists (rarely a Northern California Chicano or Chicana in sight)

5) Apparently, promoted the work of Chicano artists to international galleries and publications (Mexico, Europe, Asia... nice)

Chon's Los Angeles artistic and academic collaboration is groundbreaking. In San Jose, San Francisco, Berkeley, Austin, etc., Chicanos are typically relegated to smaller galleries even though their work is just as good if not better than their peers in Southern California. These communities don't have a hard-working academic like Chon making waves and news.

Typically scholars are sequestered in their ivory tower writing books and participating on the occasional panel. These tired academics are the norm, but Chon has broken out of this paradigm. This is great for LA artists and definitely bad news for other communities who lack an articulate and passionate person who is promoting Chicano and Chicana art "con ganas". Makes me wish I was born in Los Angeles... almost.

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Mex/LA” Exhibits Modern Chicano Art

Article from the Occidental College Weekly

Southern California's Getty Center-sponsored Pacific Standard Time initiative, a collaboration between more than 60 art institutions across Southern California, celebrates the growth of Los Angeles' art scene and its establishment as a center of artistic innovation between 1945 and 1980.

The project officially starts October 1, but several participating institutions have opened their doors early, including the Museum of Latin American Art, located in the East Village Arts district of Long Beach.

The Museum of Latin American Art unveiled "MEX/LA: ‘Mexican' Modernism(s) in Los Angeles, 1930-1985," on Sept. 18, an exhibit that examines the complex relationship between Mexican culture and the Los Angeles melting pot through modern, avant-garde artwork.

On display until Jan. 29, 2012, much of the work displayed showcases the interaction between pop culture, modernist traditions and traditional Mexican folk art.

"The exhibition, in a way, is like the city of Los Angeles itself," the curator Ruben Ortiz-Torres said.

"Like a modern collage, it is a fragmented juxtaposition of simultaneous clashing and contesting representations and misrepresentations that do not quite integrate but talk to each other and together form awhole."

Saturated with allusions to political and social issues, the exhibit does more than merely showcase significant pieces of art produced throughout this particular time period.

Ortiz-Torres selected pieces from an incredibly vast selection of artists, varying from filmmakers to photographers to experimental artists.

Numerous pieces are on display, for example, by Graciela Iturbide, a Mexican-born photographer who is best known for her images of the daily lives of Mexican-Americans in East Los Angeles.

Her photograph "Cholas, White Fence, East LA" (1986) captures four young women flashing gang signs while posing beneath a mural of former President of Mexico Benito Juarez, infamous revolutionary general PanchoVilla and Mexican Revolution figurehead Emiliano Zapata.

David Alfaro Siquerios' mural "Mitin en la calle" (Street Meeting) documents a trade union militant addressing a multiracial audience, making more overt social commentary.

Harry Gamboa Jr., one of the founders of the Chicano performance art collective, ASCO, is also featured in the exhibit as well as the influential photographer Edward Weston, a Southern Californian who lived and created his most powerful work in Mexico. Weston's famous portrait of Mexican painter Jose Clemente Orozco is featured at the exhibit and reflects the relationship between Mexican and American artists during this time period.

Martin Ramirez' work of collages and drawings, which directly evinces pop culture's intersection with high art forms, deals with Mexican folk traditions in a way influenced by twentieth-century modernism.

A large selection of Disney sketch artists is on display as well. In the ultimate portrayal of low/high art, however, the 1944 Disney film "The Three Cabelleros" plays among pieces by Weston and Siquerios.

Despite the cohesive execution and diverse selection of art, the exhibit lacks an adequate appraisal of the audience's knowledge of the history behind the pieces on display.

The brief timeline of Latino history in L.A. outside the entrance to the building provides some context, but in retrospect, it would have been beneficial to have a more extensive knowledge of the Chicano experience inL.A. throughout the twentieth century in order to appreciate the complexity and multidimensional quality of the exhibit.

Many images reference specific incidents in Mexican history, without adequate explanation on the placard.

Consequently, the importance of the artwork might be lost on those who are uninformed about Los Angeles and Mexico's tumultuous history.

For example, multiple pieces pay homage to the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, when violence erupted between white sailors stationed in Los Angeles and Mexican youths.

Without sufficient background, much of the meaning is lost on the viewer.

If "MEX/LA" is any indication of the Pacific Standard Time exhibits to come, though, Los Angeles art enthusiasts can expect increasingly vibrant and important cultural milestones.

The works of "MEX/LA" portray the chaotic periods of Los Angeles' past through the lens of social, political and racial analysis.

The art displayed is not only aesthetically interesting, but also culturally relevant, a theme to be continued throughout the remainder of the Pacific Standard Time initiative.

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Scholar Shifra Goldman, 85, dies

By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez of KPCC

A preeminent scholar of Chicano and Latin American art, Shifra Goldman, died on Sunday from complications of Alzheimer's disease.

Goldman was approaching middle age when she enrolled at UCLA to earn her doctorate in art history. In the early 1970s she was one of the first academics to write seriously about the growing work of Chicano artists in L.A. and other parts of the southwest.

Television director and filmmaker Jesus Salvador Treviño said Goldman took him to Olvera Street in the late 1960s and showed him a whitewashed 1932 mural by renowned Mexican artist Siqueiros.

"She was very much involved in Mexican-American art and in Mexican art," Treviño says. "She was one of the pioneers that was giving it credence and that was giving in respectability at a time when few people even acknowledged its existence.

The Getty tapped into Goldman’s research; it's building an interactive viewing area next to the mural and on the museum's website.

Treviño says Goldman was a mentor to many artists and critics. Artists came to expect her brutally honest criticism of their work at gallery openings.

Shifra Goldman was 85 years old when she died.

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1970s L.A. Chicano Conceptual Art Group Gets its Due

[Click header to go to original article. Click photo to enlarge. Photo courtesy of LACMA.]

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez for KCET SoCal Focus

I'm worried. The internet is not a history book and if the book is dead, maybe so will be the exploits of ASCO. For the time being there's hope. I got my hands on a copy of the exhibition catalogue, "ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972-1987." The show is currently on display at the L.A. County Museum of Art.

My fingertips gorge as they read the raised, printed images on the cover: an old razor blade, Patssi Valdez's piercing eyes inside two lips. I thumb through some of the 432 pages like a deck of cards -- the house always wins -- and there on pages 258 and 259, a two-page spread of a photograph depicting that which has become legendary in the Latino art world: the 1972 graffiti spray painting of a wall outside LACMA. The placazo heard around the Chicano world. The four ASCO founding members are represented: Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herron with their spray painted tags, and Patssi Valdez standing behind the chest-high wall white wall, looking to her left, at someone or something coming, maybe in the distance of time.

As Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal and made it art, the four artists signed LACMA and turned it into the largest piece of Chicano art. It was a response to a curator having told one of the members that Chicanos didn't belong in the museum's galleries. ASCO outdid Duchamp.

I was out of town last Wednesday so I couldn't sip the wine and chew the cheese at LACMA's opening for the show. I emailed a few people to hear how it went and to hear about how the exhibit deals with the lesser known members of the group. I've written about ASCO here and there. A few weeks ago The New York Times published a lengthy article about ASCO's current show. It was meant to bring New Yorkers and non-Chicanos up to date. The article hit all the points well known in these parts: the LACMA graffiti, the founders all met at Garfield High School, the first happenings as marriage of civil rights politics and conceptual art, and in one long sentence near the end of the article a reference to a sizeable group of collaborators and the group's implosion due to longstanding rivalries and grudges.

Who were these collaborators? What did they do? Why couldn't everyone get along? The last time I'd heard anything significant on the topic was four years ago from then-L.A. Weekly reporter Daniel Hernandez. His lengthy piece caused some former ASCO members to spit at the very mention of his name.

Hernandez's article reported the fissures that have turned into San Andreas-sized faults between the four founding members of the group and the more numerous ASCO collaborators who joined to various degrees later. Their calzones are in a twist over credit, who deserves it and for what. Some of the artists who joined ASCO later or contributed serious work to the group feel that the founding members have erased their participation in essays and other documentary writing. Some of the founding members believe the collaborators were part of a junior varsity ASCO.

Hernandez's article may read as gossip and soap opera but on my re-reading of it four years later I find that he plays it down the middle much more than I remembered. He went out and talked to as many people as possible to get a broader picture of the story.

So, how does this LACMA art show reconcile any of the fissures? It seems like the only time all the ASCO members and collaborators will be on the same page is being on the same pages of the exhibition catalogue. The curators of the exhibition, Rita Gonzalez and C. Ondine Chavoya, told me by email that giving the collaborators credit was an important part of their curatorial work.

"The core members Valdez, Gamboa, Gronk, Herrón, and quite frequently Humberto Sandoval and Diane Gamboa, were present over the fifteen years of Asco's activity while others might have been intensely involved for two or three years (Marisela Norte, Sean Carrillo, Daniel Villarreal, Consuelo Flores, Maria Elena Gaitán, Barbara Carrasco, etc, etc). There are many artists and performers who also developed their work in conversation with Asco, such as Jerry Dreva, Louis Jacinto, Teddy Sandoval, and Ricardo Valverde. We were well aware that we could not produce the definitive or comprehensive account of the extent of all contributions to Asco by these various participants. That, we hope, is for future scholarship and through exhibitions and stagings of Asco's scripted performances."

Several members won't talk about it, to me at least. "I do not discuss anything to do with the entity called asco," is what accomplished artist and UC Irvine professor Daniel Joseph Martinez emailed me.

Diane Gamboa, sister of ASCO founder Harry Gamboa Jr., isn't happy with the current show.

"It is obvious that the macho con game in manipulating history continues. I was a significant member of Asco from 1980 to 1987, not just one of the many collaborators or groupies. The popular elite Chicano Art Culture of 2011 and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art selected to shun the Chicana / female involvement, voice and creative expression within the Asco period. Is this part of the dumbing down of society in general or is it simply sleazy?" is what Gamboa emailed me.

The catalogue is chock full of photos, oral histories, and academic evaluations of the paintings, performances, music, and happenings staged by the group over a decade and a half.

Since its founding, most of what young Chicanos knew about ASCO was piecemeal through a few group show art catalogues, second hand accounts, and a lot of myths about the East L.A. group that rocked the L.A. art house for 15 years.

Poet Consuelo Flores participated in ASCO movies and performances. She said lots of people came up to her at the LACMA opening surprised that she'd been in the group.

"Many of the artists who weren't necessarily featured in the show - or historically for that matter - are actually very well known in their own right and within their specific community - I count myself among them. The fact that a general public may not know of their participation in this group has more to do with the way the group has been promoted than it has to do with the specific work of these individuals. I understand the limitations the curators had with trying to present the entire work of this group. Would I have done it differently - yes, but I also have a vested interest in the way it would have been presented. Each person who was at some point part of ASCO served the group at that specific point in time. And for better or for worse, we each took something from that experience as well. The fact that everyone - except the original four - was less featured is because of the way the group was marketed. Perception is reality and the perception continues to be that despite what work was done by other important artists as part of ASCO, the original four were going to be the focus because that was who ASCO was," Flores told me by email.

On page 324 in the catalogue Joey Terrill's fake magazine cover screams "Homeboy Beautiful" and "Homo-Homeboys!" around the picture of a dark haired, dark mustachioed, young Latino man. It's just one of several queer collaborations that are part of the ASCO story. By email Terrill told me he saw the exhibition on opening night and liked it a lot.

the curators have done a great job in presenting as comprehensive an overview of the work generated by ASCO especially given the ephemeral and conceptual strategies that they employed which resist not just categorization but the accumulation of "art objects" usually showcased in museums. I believe the show does a pretty good job in putting their output in the context of the times both culturally and politically. I was also pleased to be present as LACMA the institution recognized the contribution of ASCO as the homegrown art phenom that it was. For years LA seemed to turn a blind eye to the creative output in their own backyard even as ASCO members (and "Chicano art" in general) received more investigation and review in other countries and cities.

The rap is that European museums and curators have been more interested in the merits of Chicano art from the get go.

Gonzalez tells me this isn't the final telling of the ASCO story. Wow. Really? What other hometown museum will put this much work and resources (Williams College of Art co-organized the show) to an exhaustive showing of the group? The contemporary art museum on Bunker Hill that will soon be exhibiting the black and white photos of Weegee's years in Los Angeles?

"We are really lucky that the Asco retrospective is happening in tandem with Pacific Standard Time. Asco and the work of their peers in Chicano art, performance art, and conceptual art, will be included in the shows at the Fowler (by the curatorial team at UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center), the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Latin American Art. Although ours might be the largest, none of the curators working with this material could ever represent the long ranging and complex history that is Asco or Chicano art history, for that matter. Looking at the exhibition walls, Ondine and I see there are so many other curatorial approaches that one could formulate out of the art works on the checklist--so many different approaches."

That's the beauty of laying it all out in black and white and with a nice cover. In the following decades the catalogue of the ASCO retrospective may reach the hands of someone with Gonzalez's sky's-the-limit attitude. After all, as the story goes, it was only 40 years ago that a LACMA curator told two young Chicanos that art by people like them didn't belong in the museum.

Poet and Journalist Adolfo Guzman-Lopez writes his column Movie Miento every week on KCET's SoCal Focus blog. It is a poetic exploration of Los Angeles history, Latino culture and the overall sense of place, darting across LA's physical and psychic borders.

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Bakersfield conservative exhibits his Chicano poster collection

[Click header to go to original article]

By Jennifer Self, Bakersfield Californian jself@bakersfield.com

This poster, a protest against Sun-Maid, is part of an exhibit at Metro Galleries to be unveiled Friday. Collector Craig Neville jokes that he thinks it might be illegal to display the poster in Fresno County.

Somewhere, Cesar Chavez is either laughing or weeping.

But the contradiction doesn't seem as blatant after a conversation with the affable collector Craig Neville, owner of Henley's Photo in downtown Bakersfield.

It seems Neville, who for years worked as a labor contractor, takes the verynarrow middle ground on what has been a bitter and protracted struggle between workers and growers.

"My political views -- I'm not strong that way,"he said over the phone Monday.

"To me, the past is the past, and we all respect each other's opinions, and I think there are beautiful pieces there that mean something to someone, and I think it's time people have access to them."

Neville means what he says about access:The 60-odd pieces he's been collecting over the last few years have been in storage until now. But Metro Galleries president Don Martin got wind of the art and persuaded Neville to display a few of the pieces at the gallery during First Friday tomorrow evening.

"I've been researching the artists and the groups that created these posters and prints for the past few weeks," Martin said. "Most were done at the height of the farm-labor movement and many of them are part of the fabric of the history of this community.

"I'm not trying to make a political statement by showing these but rather encouraging the viewer to remember or learn about this era."

The subject matter of Neville's collection -- mostly posters and drawings -- ranges from religious iconography to Chicano pride to anti-grower sloganeering to stirring calls to action directed at field workers.

Depending on one's political inclinations, some of the more provocative pieces could be dismissed as flame-throwing propaganda, created to mobilize public support for boycotts and other union action. But tying the art together into a cohesive collection are the overarching themes of social justice, empowerment and cultural identity.

Neville estimates that most of the pieces were created in the 1960s and '70s. He acquired many from a friend, whom he described as "being in the movement," though he declined to give the man's name out of respect for his privacy. Neville said much of the work bears the stamp of a Los Angeles art gallery, which he believes is a sign of its authenticity. For information on the other pieces, he consulted the reference guide "Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation."

"What they do is various people get together and analyze, review and kind of maintain the history of the Chicano movement as it pertains to the '60s and '70s," said Neville, who noted that his collection contains works by noted Mexican-American artists Salvador Roberto Torres and Jose Montoya.

The most current image, a poster made from a 2004 San Francisco billboard, depicts then-President George W. Bush with the word "LIAR" scrawled under the portrait (no hard feelings:Neville points out he voted for Bush).

But his favorite piece is probably the least political of all: a poster that features a little girl in a sweet watermelon-print summer dress.

"It would break my heart (to sell it) and, again, I don't know if I'm parting with it all," said Neville, who as of earlier this week hadn't quite settled on which, if any, of the pieces will be offered for sale.

"The big thing Friday night is putting it out there. I want to share this."

According Bakersfield resident Henry Rangel, "I sold the pieces cheap. Yes, I sold my birthright but I would like some credit."

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Conservative student to fight discipline by Fresno State

[Click image to enlarge. Click header to go to original article.]

By Heather Somerville, The Fresno Bee

Neil O'Brien arrived at Fresno State in fall 2010, and before the semester was over he had spearheaded a conservative movement aimed at driving out illegal-immigrant students and challenging what he calls radical ideas espoused by Fresno State administrators.

Now he has gone a step further. After Fresno State took disciplinary action against him for allegedly threatening two faculty members in the Chicano and Latin American Studies Department, O'Brien hired a lawyer.

And not just any lawyer -- Brian Leighton, a Clovis attorney who won a major case against the CIA in 2009 and has gained a reputation for challenging federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Claiming the college has squashed O'Brien's First Amendment rights, Leighton said he is eager to go up against Fresno State. "I don't like what Fresno State is doing," Leighton said.

O'Brien will face administrators at a judiciary hearing Sept. 13. If he and Leighton don't like the outcome, they're prepared to go to court.

O'Brien's judiciary mess started with a poem printed last May in La Voz de Aztlan, an ethnic student publication distributed with the college newspaper. O'Brien took issue with language in the student-written poem, most notably the term "white savage."

O'Brien said he wanted to know why the poem was published in a student-supported newspaper. So last May, armed with a video camera, he headed to the offices of Chicano and Latin American Studies Chair Victor Torres and teacher Maria-Aparecida Lopes to demand answers. Torres is one of the newspaper advisers.

His unannounced visit rattled the teachers, who alerted campus authorities.

In Torres' formal complaint, he wrote that O'Brien was "belligerent and loud" and that he felt threatened by O'Brien's "hostile and angry attitude" and "unwillingness to leave my office."

In a separate complaint, Lopes said she felt "threatened and vulnerable."

In a written statement, Torres said he isn't involved in newspaper editing, but that all short stories and poems "are protected by the same right that Mr. O'Brien uses to shield his own publications -- the freedom of speech and expression."

O'Brien, 28, has a website that challenges illegal immigrants and the "radical liberalism" at Fresno State.

College officials have charged O'Brien with violating the student code of conduct. He calls the accusations lies and refuses to accept the school's settlement that requires him to stay 100 feet from the Chicano and Latin American Studies department and faculty. He will contest the charges at the judiciary hearing.

Carolyn Coon, assistant vice president for student affairs and dean of students, is handling the case. Federal law prevents her from speaking about O'Brien, but she said it's rare for a student to take a case this far. The school holds at most one judiciary hearing per year, and many years there are none. The hearings, Coon said, take a lot of time and resources.

In her 10 years on the job, Coon said no student has taken a disciplinary case to court.

Leighton said he would try to solve the case out of court, but he could file charges against Fresno State for violating O'Brien's freedom of speech and right to a speedy trial. Leighton is protesting college rules that prohibit him from attending the hearing.

"I don't know a bigger due process violation than that," he said.

O'Brien said being barred from the Chicano and Latin American Studies could delay his graduation. But O'Brien is a recreation administration major, and while classes in Chicano and Latin American Studies could satisfy his general education requirements, they are not required for his major.

Contact: HSOMERVILLE@FRESNOBEE.COM OR (559) 441-6412

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