Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement

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October 16, 2011- February 26, 2012

Beginning with the establishment of the first Chicano art gallery in 1969 in East Los Angeles, Chicano artists began a collective re-imagining of the urban landscape through photography, graphic arts, murals, and large-scale architectural plans, as well as through painting, sculpture, installation, and drawing. While their approach was collective in spirit, and undertaken in the context of the Chicano civil rights movement, these artists engaged in varied and debated positions on aesthetics, media, ideology, and the social or community function for their art. Their work was at once local, identity-based, and global in orientation, exploring the uncharted spaces between Mexican tradition, Chicano vernacular, and American modernism. This exhibition maps the diverse social networks among Chicano artist groups and art spaces in Los Angeles during the 1970s. These include Asco, Centro de Arte Público (CAP), East Los Streetscapers, Goez Art Studio and Gallery, Los Four, Mechicano Art Center, Plaza de la Raza, Self Help Graphics and Art, and Social Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). In showing how these artists mapped another L.A. – as part of a social protest and community empowerment movement – the exhibit presents little-seen work and documentation that reveal a complex history of the artists as they both navigated and imagined the social spaces of Los Angeles.

Mapping Another L.A is part of L.A. XICANO, four inter-related exhibitions organized by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center as part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980, an unprecedented collaboration of more than fifty cultural institutions across Southern California, which are coming together to tell the story of the birth of the LA art scene. Initiated through grants from the Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time will take place for six months beginning October 2011.

This exhibition is curated by Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas.