[Click image by SFGate to enlarge]The art studio in San Francisco's Mission District has served Latino artists since it was founded in 1970. Its 40-year retrospective exhibition, "Galeria 4.0," is designed around concepts that encapsulate Latino art over the years.
Those concepts derive from the Chicano civil rights movement, during which artists reclaimed their Mexican American ethnicity and culture via art.
"Basically we looked at the Chicano art movement and the Galeria's place in that movement," said Raquel de Anda, the Galeria's associate curator. "What's beautiful about it is it's very porous and the concepts bleed from one to another."
In the past four decades, Latino artists the world over have been embraced here through a common thread of passionate work steeped in community pride and cultural activism.
"Galeria 4.0" boasts acclaimed artists such as José Antonio Burciaga, whose work is juxtaposed with that of young talent such as Mitsy Avila Ovalles and Rio Yañez.
Yañez essentially comes from Chicano art royalty - his parents are Yolanda Lopez and Rene Yañez, one of the gallery's founding members - yet he's crafted his own techniques and style while remaining true to an art movement his parents helped create.
Work from Rio Yañez's "Ghetto Frida: Mission Memories" series is featured in the show, where he reinterpreted Frida Kahlo as a modern-day chola, replete with distinctive tattoos of teardrops falling from her right eye and "Diego" tattooed on her neck. The series is set in the Mission against such symbolic landmarks as the New Mission movie theater.
Many of the outdoor billboard mock-ups, like Rio Yañez's, that have graced the Galeria are being showcased, along with other emblems of the studio's past, like tear sheets from calendars that local artists used to produce.
"There's so much history, so it's difficult to meld 40 years of Latino artwork, but hopefully it'll start conversations about the Mission," de Anda said of the exhibition. "Something the Galeria has always tended to do is educate. There's going to be a lot of history here and vignettes and lessons about Chicano art and how it's broken out of its framework in a lot of ways."
Other portions of the show offer a Día de los Muertos display and other installations involving video and photo. What it comes down to, de Anda said, is an exhibition that reinforces the studio's roots.
"The Galeria has always been about voicing and creating a space for people who have been stifled or ignored," de Anda said. "The times have changed, but there's still a need for that."
Through Jan. 29. 1-7 p.m. Tues., noon-6 p.m. Wed.-Sat. Galeria de la Raza, 2857 24th St., S.F. www.galeriadelaraza.org.
- Danielle Samaniego, 96hours@sfchronicle.com
This article appeared on page G - 14 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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