Photographer's Close View of Cultura

By Monica Rhor, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

HOUSTON - With his Nikon D2X camera balanced on a tripod and natural light glinting through an open doorway, Chuy Benitez stood inside the waiting room of the Auto Chrome Plating Company.

He waited for nearly four hours: for the shot he had envisioned since first stumbling upon the shop tucked in an industrial pocket of southeast Houston months earlier; for the scene that would encapsulate the juncture of work and family life in this business owned by a Mexican-American family.

As the minutes passed on that Friday afternoon, Benitez waited for the instant when children would tumble into the space already brimming with workers in blue jumpsuits, wheels of polished chrome and stuffed deer heads mounted on the walls.

Suddenly, the shop owner's children spilled into the room and a dark-haired, ponytailed girl waved a doll with tresses just like her own, beguiling her grandfather who still wore his rumpled mechanic's uniform.

"This is what I've been looking for," Benitez recalls thinking.

Over the next eight minutes, the young photographer fired off the frames that would be melded together to create "Family Chrome Shop," an oversized panoramic photograph that is part of a series called "Houston Cultura."

That series, and Benitez's collection of portraits of Houston's Mexican-American community leaders, offer an intimate view of an often marginalized population through tableaux of events plucked from the daily life of Mexican-Americans. Both are currently on exhibit through April 12 at the Lawndale Art Gallery in Houston.

"It's a really great look into an important part of the Houston community," said Dennis Nance, the gallery's director of exhibitions and programming. "It's focusing on one community, but accessible to everyone. It says, 'This is who we are,' but it is not exclusive."

Like "Family Chrome Shop," in which a multitude of images, actions and story lines fill a 110-inch-by-36-inch frame, Benitez's work captures the juxtaposition of young and old, modern and mythic, ordinary and unusual, Mexican and American.

In one piece from "Houston Cultura," a group of charros, or Mexican cowboys, riding horseback and wielding lassos converge on a downtown intersection. In another, a mariachi band in finely embroidered costumes entertains shoppers inside a Fiesta supermarket.

"I went through all these transformations of finding those things in the community and I'm just trying to pass that along," says Benitez, a 24-year-old with a sharply trimmed goatee and amber eyes. "If you know nothing about it, look, I knew nothing. Let me show you what there is."
Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, Benitez grew up living in a place where the two cultures existed side-by-side, but separately.

As a child, he was taught the lessons of the Chicano civil rights movement, which emphasized the search for identity and independence. He fed his artistic hunger by studying the work of 

Chicano photographers and Mexican muralists.
It wasn't until he went to the University of Notre Dame that he realized the mix of cultures within him.

"I thought I was American. From growing up in El Paso, living on one side of border, I thought that made you American," says Benitez, who is of Mexican descent. "But I realized I'm so not purely American. I'm such a hybrid."

After he graduated from college, Benitez began to look for other examples of hybridity. He found the perfect muse in Houston, a city where Mexican and American cultures are fused on an almost molecular level.

"There's no border, so it's all just mashing up and doing whatever it wants to do. No holds barred. It's just free," he says about Houston.

Benitez began to document "Houston Cultura" three years ago, after he entered graduate school at the University of Houston and a fellowship at the UH Center for Mexican-American Studies.

For that series, Benitez chose to use a digital panoramic technique in which multiple shots of the same scene are layered together, creating a richly textured canvas that reflects the influence of Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and Saturnino Herran.

In "Leaders of Houston Cultura," Benitez's portraits of community leaders, he used a fisheyed, wide-angle lens to create 360-degree diptychs, which serve as metaphors for the subjects' dual cultural identity. So far, Benitez has shot more than 40 portraits.

In Benitez's panoramic photographs, as in Mexican murals, the wide frame encompasses a profusion of details and activities. The main subjects - ordinary people whose lives often go unheralded - loom large in the foreground. But every crevice and corner contains an additional nugget of information about the subject's lives.

"I wanted to get physically close to everyone and everything," he notes. "If I'm getting close, if I'm getting more in-depth than anyone else is, then my photographs are going to communicate that to other people and people will hopefully get feeling of having a connection with the community. "The focus may be the Mexican-American community, but the themes, he says, are simple and universal: work, family, music, religion.

"La Virgen de la Baking Pan" shows a family on a pilgrimage to a makeshift shrine where they pay homage to an incarnation of the Virgin Mary on a piece of cookware. Protected by umbrellas, the family seems to move toward the icon with both reverence and fear.

The baking pan itself is draped with rosaries and flanked by candles bearing the likeness of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the "brown-skinned virgin" who is said to have appeared before Mexican peasant Juan Diego in 1531. In the far corner, a neighbour sits on his porch, undisturbed by the otherworldly occurrence.

In many of the works, tiny markers of Houston (often Houston Astros paraphernalia) pop up amid the chaos - a reminder that the photographs are not only portraits of people but also of a city in transformation.

"These are simply things worth sharing because I want there to be better understanding of where I come from and where Houston is going. Houston is officially a Hispanic city," Benitez says.

"It goes along with what the future is going to hold, which is a browner America."

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Chicano art, beyond rebellion

'Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement' provides a rare showcase at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

By Agustin Gurza, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Visitors to the sprawling Chicano art show opening today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are greeted by a display of photos depicting a group of daring guerrilla street artists known as ASCO, Spanish for "nausea." The photographs are from the early 1970s -- which seems to defy the show's title, "Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement."

In one famous photo from 1972, in the midst of the movement, the museum itself was the target of these Dadaesque subversives protesting the exclusion of Chicano art from its galleries. In "Spray Paint LACMA," ASCO member Patssi Valdez is seen posing outside the museum's walls, which had been tagged overnight by her rebellious cohorts, Gronk, Willie Herron III and Harry Gamboa Jr. This act of creative defiance -- turning the building into a Chicano canvas -- is now enshrined in the very place that sparked the protest by treating Chicanos as the phantoms of the art world. So does this mean that Chicano artists have finally found the acceptance they sought? That they can now put down their spray cans and pursue careers as equals in a harmonious "post-ethnic" art world?

"I have a feeling if I was a young person today, I don't think I would spray paint the museum," Gamboa, 56, an author and college lecturer, answers slyly. "Because now, [tagging] has been felonized, and to put three signatures on a county building might result in three strikes. Who knows if we would all wind up in prison for life and never have the chance to pursue careers as artists?"

Half the artists in the current exhibition weren't even born when Gamboa and company tagged the museum, but they carry on the ASCO conceptual tradition by expressing their own set of social concerns in bold, albeit at times oblique, ways. Thus, the choice of ASCO as preamble is an intriguing invitation to rethink Chicano art, past and present.

"Phantom Sightings" (a phrase adapted from Gamboa's writings) features more than 120 works, including 10 commissioned specifically for the occasion, by 31 artists from across the country, some of whom don't call themselves Chicano. Most came of age in the 1990s and several have just recently started to draw international attention. Three -- Ruben Ochoa, Eduardo Sarabia and Mario Ybarra Jr. -- are currently represented in the sometimes reputation-making Whitney Biennial in New York.

Curated by Rita Gonzalez, Howard Fox and Chon Noriega, this is the first major Chicano group exhibition presented at LACMA since 1987's "Hispanic Art in the United States," which was organized by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. And it is the first such show organized for LACMA itself in more than three decades, since its ground-breaking "Chicanismo en el Arte" in 1975 and "Los Four" the year before.

Unlike past Chicano art shows that focused heavily on paintings, the new collection highlights work in an array of styles and formats, including sculpture, mixed-media installations, photo-based pieces and so-called interventions, art that interjects itself in public spaces or social settings. Since much of the work is conceptual, "Phantom Sightings" is likely to leave some viewers scratching their heads, needing help deciphering what artists had in mind with animated blobs that change shape (Rubén Ortiz Torres) or droopy replicas of kitchen appliances made of vinyl (Margarita Cabrera). Essays and artist bios are included in a 240-page companion catalog that is bound to become a reference work.

Variety, not ethnicity, is the show's hallmark. Artist Ken Gonzales-Day deals with the lynching of Mexican Americans in California by digitally erasing the victims from historic photos. Sandra de la Loza, meanwhile, fills in the gaps that history erased by placing plaques (that are quickly removed) in places such as the whitewashed Siqueiros mural at Olvera Street. And Julio Cesar Morales reveals the resourcefulness of immigrants trying to cross the border illegally by exposing them in their hiding places, such as the little girl inside a piñata, through transparent water-color illustrations based on real cases.

The art is by turns provocative, fanciful, stunning, strange and even noisy, in the case of one audio installation titled "Migrant Dubs." Fox calls the show "a visually cacophonous and unruly thing." To some extent, it reflects the hardscrabble barrios where some of these artists were nurtured. That street aesthetic is reflected in the design for the exhibition, with rough-hewn plywood structures, and in signage and promotions using old-fashioned wheat paste posters.

Big expectations

The show is generating intense expectations, partly due to how rarely the museum turns its attention to Chicano art in its own backyard, as opposed to Mexican or Latin American art. Galleries from Santa Monica to East L.A. are staging shows to ride the coattails of "Phantom Sightings."

Even for the few midcareer artists in the show, participation can mean validation. "It's wonderful that I'm showing with a lot of up-and-coming or emerging artists," says Delilah Montoya, 52, a Texas-based photographer. "It makes me feel as though I've been going down the right track."

But the show is also stirring debate, starting with the subtitle, which draws its own line of partition: "Art After the Chicano Movement." It suggests not only a generational but an aesthetic break with Chicano artists who emerged during the civil rights struggle, known for illustrative paintings and murals, political content and traditional iconography, such as revolutionaries, lowriders and the Virgin of Guadalupe.

With its emphasis on younger artists who don't wear their ethnicities on their canvases, "Phantom Sightings" seems to be inaugurating a "post-ethnic" Chicano era. Coming at the height of a presidential campaign in which some hail Sen. Barack Obama as the first "post racial" candidate, the timing seems propitious.

Yet some worry that implication is demeaning. "The inherited plight and struggle and history of the Chicano art movement is not one you can toy with, not without expecting any sort of questioning," says Reyes Rodriguez, director of Tropico de Nopal, a gallery near downtown that has exhibited several of the artists in the show. "Do we just keep quiet and allow LACMA to declare that Chicano art is dead? What does that really mean? That you want to be more European or more a part of, let's call it the Anglo world, or whatever it is that validates you? Is that really success? Do we not have a voice of our own?"

The notion of ethnic identity as passé is pervasive in contemporary American society, not only in the arts but in pop music, politics, journalism and literature. At some art schools, being post-ethnic is almost an admission requirement. Yet some young artists still question the burden that the post-racial ethos places exclusively on racial minorities.

"People say multiculturalism is dead and we're, like, 'OK, when's the post-white show?' " says Eamon Ore-Giron, who holds an MFA from UCLA and collaborated on the "Migrant Dubs" exhibit. "Nowadays, it's almost as if your identity is erased, in a lot of ways. But at the same time, you are who you are, and that's what you're going to represent."

"Phantom Sightings" emerged from LACMA's Latino Arts Initiative, launched in 2004 under former director Andrea Rich and designed as a collaboration between the museum and UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center. Noriega was named an adjunct curator and put in charge of the five-year plan to develop exhibitions, publications and other projects.

One of the projects already on the books then was a plan to exhibit highlights from the Chicano art collection of actor and comedian Cheech Marin. That show, a spinoff of Marin's larger exhibition called "Chicano Visions," is now scheduled to open at LACMA in June under the title "Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.: Selections From the Cheech Marin Collection."

What the news release about the initiative did not mention was the contentious, behind-the-scenes negotiations between Marin and the museum, which originally turned down his show outright. The actor threatened to go public with the issue before museum officials agreed to the scaled-down version of "Chicano Visions," which has since toured the country to sold-out and sometimes record crowds.

The museum's initial resistance, explains Noriega, was based on its reluctance to showcase private collections.

But Marin scoffs at the rationale, pointing to LACMA's gleaming new wing named after billionaire developer Eli Broad, who lent his collection for display. "It was ironic to me," says Marin. "You would think L.A. would be the first museum to sign up for the show. But, in fact, it was the last."

The very timing of these back-to-back shows raises some questions. Is the museum again signaling a generational split? Is it drawing a line between the young artists of "Phantom Sightings" and the older ones in the "Marin Collection"?

"I would hope not," says Noriega. "I would hope that people would attend both shows and come out and go, 'Wow, these are some pretty big bookends for a category called Chicano art! I would like to see some of the stuff that comes in between.' "

"Phantom Sightings" does not attempt to present a survey of Chicano art from the last show to the present, as if the museum were trying to pick up where it left off in 1975. "We thought it would be a disservice to the field to do that kind of show because in some ways it would sanction the idea that institutions can kind of catch up every one to three decades," says Noriega. "Besides, it's an impossible task, in many ways doomed to failure like the Whitney Biennial. No, we do much better if we accept the institution's commitment to ongoing activity in this area."

Changing times

Contemporary Chicano artists are working in a social environment vastly different from the days of the Chicano movement. In Los Angeles, to begin with, the Latino population has boomed, putting demographic pressure on cultural institutions to respond. Recurrent waves of immigrants constantly revive the issues of marginalization and social acceptance, even as the offspring of previous generations progress up the social ladder, taking leadership roles as politicians, academics and curators, which were practically nonexistent 30 years ago.

Most of the artists in "Phantom Sightings" were born in the 1970s and live and work in Los Angeles. The oldest is 52 (not counting ASCO); the youngest 27. All have advanced degrees, 20 with masters of fine arts, most from California schools. Only two were born in Mexico.

Whether they call themselves Chicano or not, several artists explore issues of class and culture inherent in their backgrounds. In many cases, artists transform mundane objects from their everyday experience to make imaginative or pointed statements with the byproduct.

El Paso artist Adrian Esparza, for example, unspools the threads of a multicolored Mexican serape to create an abstract geometric pattern, thereby "taking artisanal traditions and using them in a postmodern way," as Fox puts it. Margarita Cabrera, also from El Paso, uses fabric from U.S. Border Patrol uniforms to create realistic cactus sculptures that conjures "a conceptual link between an unforgiving landscape and the relatively recent criminalization of border crossing," as Noriega explains in the catalog.

Perhaps the most obvious example of the mundane exalted as art is Ochoa's use of his family's tortilla delivery truck as a mobile art gallery. The L.A.-based artist emptied the interior of the slab-sided 1985 Chevy van and "just tricked it out" with white walls, track lighting and linoleum flooring and invited his friends to create projects for the road.

He called it "Class C," for the DMV's commercial license category, and did 75 shows from 2001 to 2005, "bringing contemporary art to the neighborhood and not dumbing it down." "I was the collaborator, curator, driver, installer and mechanic," says Ochoa, one of five artists in the exhibition who attended Otis College of Art and Design and one of six with MFAs from UC Irvine. "I'd move it around as far as my Triple-A miles would take me because it would break down and I had to tow it back."

Ochoa, born in Oceanside to Mexican immigrants, was practically raised inside that van, recruited like so many of his first-generation peers to work in their parents' business. Yet he represents a new generation of Chicanos who want to be identified primarily by their work, not their background, even though their barrio shapes their art.

"It's laid in the work, but it doesn't have to be highlighted," he says. "A lot of my work deals with different class tensions, boundaries and barriers, but it doesn't have to be solely the Mexican American experience."

For Gamboa, the former ASCO tagger, it doesn't matter what you call it as long as you give it a chance. "It's always been my contention that Chicanos are a co-equal culture and capable of participating and sharing and contributing," he says. "At some level, [the show] just gives people hope that it's possible to actually create work and have it recognized as being art."

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Download Free César E. Chávez Wallpaper 1024x768

Download a FREE César E. Chávez wallpaper for your computer. The size of the wallpaper is 1024x768. Start by clicking on the image of Chavez. Drag the larger photograph to your desktop or folder. 

FYI: The image is offered at no cost to the general public for non-commercial use. The photograph (wallpaper) of César E. Chávez is copyright 2008 Jesús Manuel Mena Garza. 

The photograph of Chavez reminds us of the struggles of the United Farm Workers of America Union (UFW). It was through their determination that many of us enjoy the freedoms we take for granted today. As the leader from San José's Sal Si Puede barrio would say, "Si se puede!"

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