Jesús Garza's Chicano Photographer show (1970-1975) continues for 30 more days

[Photo of César Estrada Chávez by Jesús Garza. Click image to view and/or download larger version. Suitable for printing.]

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Chicano Photographer, an exhibition by Riverside, California documentary photographer Jesús Manuel Mena Garza opened at the San Bernardino County Museum (SBCM) Schuilling Gallery, March 26, 2011. The exhibition continues to November 6.

The photographs were captured from 1970 to 1975. During this period, Garza took intimate photographs of Chicano icons César E. Chávez, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles and others. The photographs provide a retrospective glimpse from the unique perspective of the photojournalist and activist. The SBCM exhibition lists thirty-one select images from the photographer’s Imágenes Xicano Archive, a portion of which has already been exhibited on both coasts.

University of Redlands Professor Dr. Ann Marie Leimer adds, “During the past decades, Garza has extensively published and exhibited several documentary photographic series. The Chicano Photographer series explores important aspects of the American experience, historic events and cultural practices often marginalized by the dominant culture.” Photographs from the series have already been published in journals and books. Dr. Leimer recently completed a book on the photographic series. The exhibition is perfect for students 5 to 95. Please feel free to contact the museum or artist for more information.

San Bernardino County Museum
Schuilling Gallery
2024 Orange Tree Lane
Redlands CA 92374
Voice (909) 307-2669 ext. 227 Fax (909) 307-0689
www.sbcountymuseum.org

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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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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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Asco: A Hollywood Love Affair

By Jesús Manuel Mena Garza

[Click photo to enlarge. Click header to go to LACMA website.]

Asco, four Chicana/o artists from Los Angeles have been described as radical performance artists. Today, they are touted as revolutionary conceptual artists and their popularity is at a fever pitch.

An exhibition titled "Asco: Elite of the Obscure, a Retrospective, 1972-1987" opens to the public on Sept. 4 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Southern California Chicana/o glitterati are sure to be in attendance at the "super grande" opening on August 31.

Like all things local, Los Angelinos adore "Los Four." Along with the upcoming exhibition they are being feted as heroes by regional academia. From outsiders tagging museum walls in 1972 to being placed on a pedestal inside the museum in 2011, it has been a forty year journey for artists Harry Gamboa Jr., Willie Herrón, Patssi Valdez and Gronk.

The question I ask today is why a group like Asco flourished in Los Angeles and not in Northern California? Artists in the Bay Area painted incredible murals, posters and works on canvas but only in Southern California did Chicanos and Chicanas combine theater and art into performance art in the early seventies.

I remember there being a distinct separation in the Bay Area of those who were on stage and those who painted, printed or photographed. To combine the two genres required a force of personality or in the case of Los Four, the effect of Hollywood.

I have noticed that Hollywood holds a certain power over Southern Californians. Many here achingly desire to be part of the performance culture. Asco was “cast” by this phenomenon. It was an insular trend, not replicated outside of Tinsel Town, and not valued as much too.

The South is proud of their homegrown products. When I travel to other parts of the country, Chicanos and Chicanas also venerate their artists. Be it San Antonio, Albuquerque or Denver, they all have a parochial attitude toward their creative class.

Growing up in the Bay Area I too developed an intense sense of place. As a point of pride, I can proclaim that no artist from the South presented works on paper as politically intuitive and compelling as Northerner, Malaquias Montoya. No SoCal Chicano muralist created finer works than those on San Francisco walls. José Antonio Burciaga exalted the jalapeño to new heights in his poetry and made us proud of our spicy culture. Yes, there is culture up north... too.

Theater groups were manifest in the Bay Area. In fact, Northern California is the home of Chicano Theater and Teatro Campesino. Some of those weaned by Bay Area theater moved and infused Southern California teatro, making it more professional and relevant to the Chicano cause.

Lowriding may have been popular on Whittier Boulevard but it took three San José State Students; Sonny Madrid, Antonio Perales and Larry Gonzalez to quantify it. They explored the nuances of our car culture and delivered it to the world in Lowrider Magazine. That distinct manifestation has even found a home in Japan.

In the end, each community has their heroes. Today, LA has Asco. These four artists had the guts to get in front of the camera and perform. They are unique to the City of Angels and part of the early 70s Chicano avant-garde.

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Asco Returns Triumphant to LACMA

Max Benavidez, Huffington Post [Click header to go to original story]

When "Asco: Elite of the Obscure" opens Sept. 4 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), we will witness the closing of a 40-year-old cultural loop. During the exhibition, a famous Asco (pronounced "oss-ko") image will be seen all around L.A., as Bank of America, one of the show's sponsors, will utilize one of the art group's most compelling works, the 1974 "Instant Mural," on its ATM screens. This is an interesting juxtaposition and demonstrates how the mainstream has caught up with the Asco sensibility of simulated appropriation and hip transgression and also how commerce, art and the burgeoning Latino market are intersecting in new and innovative ways.

The LACMA show, which is part of the huge Getty-sponsored Pacific Standard Time (PST) series of exhibitions, is a great opportunity to formally applaud the genius of Harry Gamboa, Jr., Gronk, Pattsi Valdez and Willie Herrón, III, the founding members of Asco, for their groundbreaking body of work. "Asco" means "disgust" or "revulsion" in Spanish, and they called themselves that because their work evoked nausea in so many people. (The show's title, "Elite of the Obscure," came from Gamboa, who also coined other memorable terms, such as "urban exiles," "phantom culture" and "orphans of modernism" to refer to Asco and metropolitan Chicanos in general.)

What makes "Instant Mural" so potent is that it verges on being a photorealistic painting, but it's not. It was a spontaneously staged street event with a timeless cinematic quality that commented on the proliferation and content of Chicano murals, as well as the closed-off art world. Gronk, in a flowing, burgundy coat, is taping a dramatically posed Valdez in red bolero jacket, blue-jean shorts and black velvet high heels to a creamy, orange wall and doing it as quickly as possible, as if their lives depended on the speed of the act. It gives the image an ephemeral quality that illustrates how Asco mixed street art with performance art to create a new, expressive hybrid form of high and low: postmodern punk art. As Gronk said said about the piece, "I think one of the important things about our activities was the idea that we didn't ask for permission to do any of the work."

Aesthetic spontaneity and a cool desperado posture: that's the essence of Asco's work and its legacy. And, now, in a remarkable twist of fate, its work will be viewed on the ATM screens of one of the world's largest financial institutions.

It all began 40 years ago, deep in an East L.A. barrio, where four teenagers sitting around in a garage formed Asco. While it sounds like something out of Silicon Valley lore, it actually parallels other art movements, such as surrealism and Dada, that started in times of desperation and disillusionment. It was a time of war (Vietnam), and much of East L.A. was nearly in a state of police occupation.

The members of Asco were bored by the same old same old art they saw all around them, so they set out to execute their own unique artistic vision. They made "No Movies," which really aren't movies at all, and took the idea of the protest mural to its logical conclusion with the "Instant Mural" and the "Walking Mural." They also created daring street performances that recoded and satirized mainstream and Chicano cultures, as in "First Supper (After a Major Riot)." In the process they made history.

For the first time in American art history, a Chicano art group was working at the edge of art's boundaries, creating new paradigms, and turning both modern art and Chicano art inside out. Interestingly, and this is what makes the return trip to LACMA a historical event, Asco was working in a critical void and was virtually ignored by the mainstream art world that heralded so many other national and international artists who were working in similar veins. This was a classic case of Freud's "distortion of a text." The text, in this case, is the record of American art, and Asco and the meaning of its work was suppressed and annulled, partly through denial and partly through simple neglect and ignorance. In many ways, this circling back to LACMA is a triumph for the collective.

Beyond the kudos and acknowledgment, we also have to keep in mind that history's nightmare not only repeats itself but, as Voltaire said, "history consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions," and this show is a 21st-century imaginative invention. The truth is that the art world, like Asco, is tired of the same old same old.

The Asco circle of disruption closes quite neatly since their most famous intervention occurred in 1972 at LACMA, almost 40 years ago.

Here's what happened. They went to the big, public-funded museum, LACMA, to see if they could show a curator their art. The curator said something like this: "No, you people aren't fine artists, you're gang bangers and folk artists."

That enraged Asco so much that they sought an appropriate response, and very early one morning, they spray-painted their names on the museum and took a picture. If they were thought of as taggers, then there was no reason not to brand the whole museum as their work of art. They called it "Spray Paint LACMA." It was the most audacious piece of conceptual art ever affiliated with LACMA. It also established Asco as a truly avant-garde, conceptual art group, along the lines of other legendary collectives like Fluxus, Archigram, Guerrilla Girls and others.

During its heyday, which ran from about 1971 to 1987, Asco was a truly underground phenomenon, and the group displayed a rare sensibility. They were constantly innovating in a media vacuum on the streets of East L.A. At the same time, they also reworked contemporary urban identities for young Latinos, and, above all, they documented everything.

One of Asco's most subversive interventions was the "No Movie." These were images that the group circulated by mail in a series of satirical press kits and production stills. Hollywood barely acknowledged Chicanos and other Latinos during the height of Asco's creativity. To Asco's credit, it did something about it. It commented on this big-screen invisibility through the "No Movie" concept.

The "No Movies" imagery was enigmatic and alluring. Asco also created evocative titles, such as "A La Mode" and "No Tip," that referred to nonexistent films while constructing themselves as film stars in the process. The "No Movie" photos simultaneously denied and affirmed the viability of an alternative cinema, and in their surrealistic, often campy theatricality, they reclaimed a violent and alienating urban environment as the stage for subversive glamour. By producing "No Movies," Asco essentially countered the Hollywood film industry's negation of Latinos by emotionally compressing rage, distress and scathing commentary (that still rings true) into their imagery.

So, take a trip to LACMA and catch the work of these now-classic provocateurs, because, as the Walrus in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" said, "the time has come, my friends..." for Asco.

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Chicano Photographer Exhibition Continues at San Bernardino County Museum

[Photo copyright 2011 Jesus Manuel Mena Garza. All rights reserved. Click header for more information about the exhibition.]

Chicano Photographer, an exhibition by Riverside, California documentary photographer Jesús Manuel Mena Garza is available for public viewing at the San Bernardino County Museum (SBCM) Schuilling Gallery. The show continues to November 6, 2011.

Please call (909) 307-2669 x227 or email kplimley@sbcm.sbcounty.gov for more information.

Laura Romo is new director of UCSB Chicano Studies Institute

Courtesy of Edhat SB

Laura Romo, associate professor of education at UC Santa Barbara, is the new director of the campus's Chicano Studies Institute. She replaces Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, professor of English at UCSB, who held the position for the past six years.

Romo received her Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA, and joined the UCSB faculty in 2003. A leading researcher in the areas of adolescent development, parent-adolescent communication, and informal health education, she has been working with community agencies in Santa Barbara, including Girls, Inc. and La Casa de la Raza, to develop and implement family-based sex education programs for low-income, mostly immigrant, Mexican-origin mothers and daughters.

"The mother-daughter relationship is a protective factor against sexual risk behavior for adolescents," Romo said. "In the workshops, we address cultural barriers to open communication about topics such as puberty and anatomy." To date, her work has focused on younger adolescents, ages 11 to 13, but she is now conducting a study with older adolescents, ages 13 to 16, and their mothers. "The new workshops also focus on the prevention of dating violence, in addition to sexual health, contraception, and HIV transmission," she explained.

"The Chicano Studies Institute is delighted that Professor Romo accepted the position of director," said Maria Herrera-Sobek, associate vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and academic policy. "Her grant writing skills are exceptional, and she has demonstrated an ability to translate these skills into mentoring and guiding our faculty members and graduate students. Professor Romo is the recipient of several major grants, and already has been working with graduate students at the Chicano Studies Institute."

Romo, who has served as associate director of the Chicano Studies Institute and as director of the UC Linguistics Minority Research Institute, has identified three main goals for the Chicano Studies Institute that are consistent with its overall mission. First, she hopes to form interdisciplinary groups of faculty members who will collaborate on developing extramural grants related to research on Latino populations. "Bringing together experts from different disciplines within the humanities and social sciences is important because today's most pressing research and societal questions are often best addressed by scholars with different backgrounds and training," she noted.

Romo also plans to develop a training program that will directly assist graduate students in writing grant proposals for funding to support their research. "We'll also develop an undergraduate program that will provide students with training in Latino research under the mentorship of faculty members," she said.

Consistent with her own research interests, Romo plans to create opportunities to involve undergraduate students in community health efforts. Latinos are among several populations in low-income communities who suffer from a variety of health problems, according to Romo, and she is currently developing an undergraduate course that will allow students to see firsthand the health issues that exist in Latino communities. As part of the course requirements, students will complete a set number of service hours with a community-based health agency. "This type of experience may serve to increase the number of Latino students who pursue careers in the health sciences," she said.

Established in 1969 at the Center for Chicano Studies, the Chicano Studies Institute is an organized research unit that facilitates interdisciplinary research regarding the Chicano/Latino experience in California and the United States.

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MALCS Summer Institute

Opening today, August 3, 2011 - the 2011 Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social Summer Institute, Against Fear and Terror: Una Nueva Conciencia Sin Fronteras. The institute is being held August 3-6, 2011 on campus at Cal State Los Angeles.

Featured speakers include, Angela Sanbrano, Angelica Salas, Azalea Ryckman Vasquez, Dora Olivia Magana, Rossana Perez, Carolina Rivera, Anita Tijerina Revilla, J. Frank Galarte and others. There will also be arts presentations.

CONTACT INFORMATION

Address: MALCS Conference, c/o Department of Chicano Studies
King Hall C 4069
5151 State University Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90032

Email: malcscsula2011@gmail.com
Phone: (323) 343- 2190
National website: www.malcs.org

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Summer Institute of Arts and Languages

Sign up for classes in music, theater, language and dance

this summer in San Jose, California.

Click on image to enlarge.

Latina Students Land Gallery Row Exhibit for Their Interpretation of Historic Olvera Street

This month Cobá will open its headquarters to expose Art Walk attendees to a photography collection from students involved in Las Fotos Project, a non-profit, community-based program that seeks to empower Latina youth through photography. The collection of photographs is from “Nuestra Placita Olvera,” a project in which the young women captured the culture and life of the city’s historic landmark, Olvera Street, by documenting its annual celebrations.

Headquartered in the heart of the arts district in downtown Los Angeles, Cobá wanted to respect the culture of the neighborhood and thus transformed their office into a gallery featuring the work of various accomplished, local artists. Last month, Cobá featured the work of Yolanda Gonzalez, whose bold use of color and texture reflects her family’s long heritage of artists. In April, José Ramirez’s sociopolitical paintings, rich with images of Chicano culture, were a hit.

The Las Fotos Project encourages young women to express their individuality and creativity and hone their artistic talents with photography training, mentoring and field projects. On display will be the work of Valerie Beltran, age 16, Julie Cabral, age 18, Civil Hernandez, age 16, Jessenia Pineda, age 14, and Yoali Sayago, age 17. According to Las Fotos Project founder Eric V. Ibarra, “The students took a photojournalistic approach to this project by documenting historical celebrations that may be forever changed in the future. Their ability to create this beautiful installation full of color, culture, and life was very inspirational to the Las Fotos Project community and we are all very proud that their hard work and amazing accomplishments will be shared with such a large audience.”

Cobá CEO, Arnulfo Ventura stated, “Art Walk is a great venue and opportunity for these students to display their best work and I know how much this means to them.” Later adding, “Orozco’s murals in Guadalajara made an impact on me as a child and today, I see Yolanda (Gonzalez) and José (Ramirez) as some of the greats of our time. Arts have a rich history in the Latino culture and I’m just glad we’re able to provide a forum to keep celebrating these fabulous artists.”

The event takes place the evening of Thursday, June 9 during the general hours of Art Walk. Cobá, the first ready-to-drink all-natural aguas frescas company, will be providing samples of their authentic aguas frescas sweetened with organic agave.To learn more about Cobá and its work with local artists, please go to www.drinkcoba.com. For more information about Las Fotos Project, visit lasfotosproject.org.

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HOY SPACE: Sonia Romero's Inner Landscape

HOY SPACE: Sonia Romero's Inner Landscape

Gallery 4
May 20 to August 19, 2011

Vincent Price Art Museum is delighted to present a solo show by Los Angeles-based artist Sonia Romero to inaugurate its new project gallery called the HOY SPACE. In Spanish, Hoy means “today” or “nowadays,” and fittingly the HOY SPACE features contemporary artists whose practice extends across media and who address current and active contemporary topics. The HOY SPACE offers emerging artists their first museum show, and for mid-career artists, a chance to make new work that may not fit in other contexts or venues.

Ms. Romero’s installation Inner Landscape is a mixture of painting, block printing, felt sculptures, and paper cuts that are intelligently unified both formally and conceptually. Romero began as a painter, and then in college at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), she majored in printmaking thereby exploring every printing process she could: etching, lithography, silkscreen and block printing. Rather than treat each medium as a distinct and separate creation, or as an end in itself, her work reflects a bold mixing of painting with print; a juxtaposition that has become decidedly her own.

Romero’s imagery is certainly recognizable: whimsical, quirky – and even at times – playful, the artist’s approach reduces elements down to their essentials without a sense of preciousness. The innocence of her drawing belies the complexity of her subject matter. Romero is a keen investigator: her work asks questions and explores social issues. However, there is no polemical stance or finger pointing.

The three large piles we see upon entering Inner Landscape are seemingly benign, arranged like haystacks; from left to right, we recognize bison skulls, kernels of corn, and bright, white eggs, piled up to about 9 feet each. Each of these piles is directly inspired by the artist’s keen interest in the historical and contemporary relationship of people with food. The bison skulls reference American perceptions toward nature and wildlife during the founding of this country; the corn kernels pay homage to a commodity that in its superabundance has become one of the most ubiquitous; and the egg pile to an almost half billion salmonella-related egg recall that occurred in 2010.

A long-time fascination with the politics of consumption has led Romero to create what she calls “gorgeous manifestations of abundance.” Void of darkness, gloominess or judgment, in each element of her installation, Romero invites us to consider imagining our own inner landscape, and seeks to engage us with our own personal stories that may resonate with the ones she has shared with us.

Sonia Romero is a Los Angeles native, and maintains a studio in Highland Park. She received her BFA from RISD in 2002. This is her first solo museum exhibition. She has had solo shows at The Folk Tree, Los Angeles, CA and Avenue 50 Studio, Los Angeles, CA, in addition to many group exhibitions across the United States. She is also well known for her public-art-commissioned projects for the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). Please visit the artist’s website:www.SoniaRomero.net for more information.

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Santa Monica College hosts activism through art

Photo by Jeff Cote of the SMC Corsair

On Thursday, May 5, an event at Santa Monica College called "Movimiento" served as a focal point for others to see how art is incorporated into messages of activism.

The info session took place at the Pete and Susan Barrett Gallery of the Performing Arts Center, where Los Angeles based artists, activists, and organizers came together to discuss stories of successes and setbacks achieved in the convergence of activism and art.

A few of them have been inspired by student activism, confronting issues such as the Dream Act, concerning undocumented students struggling to find a place.

Bianca Hernandez, one of the first speakers, is President of SMC's Association of Latin American Students. Hernandez presented snapshots of ALAS's actions conducted on campus throughout the past couple years. She stressed the importance of political awareness, and how as a group, they try to fight what's right for them.

ALAS have also taken action in events such as the "March to End the Stereotypes," and more recently, they took part in the "March in March," a student protest fighting against tuition increases by going to Sacramento in March. Hernandez noted how they have incorporated the art of dance into their activities on campus.

Todos Somos Arizona is a collective of different community members, educators, activists, and artists who use different mediums of art and activism mixed together. Patricia Torres, a UCLA student in the Ph.D. department, and organizer with a couple of collectives in Los Angeles, said that they discuss the colonization of their communities and other concerns that they're seeing right now, such as SB 1070 and the attacks on ethnic studies.

According to Torres, INCITE! LA is an organization of radical feminists of color,committed to stopping interpersonal violence, domestic abuse, and police brutality within their communities. INCITE! LA also opposes SB 1070, Arizona's bill that allows criminalization or imprisonment of immigrants.

INCITE! held a major act of demonstration last May, in which 14 members chained themselves into a circle in front of the Downtown Los Angeles detention center, which caused it to close down for about six hours. "We saw it almost as a work of public art where we were actually stopping the everyday runnings of this detention torture place," Torres explained.

Artist Rodrigo Marti was one of the organizers of the info session. His art project that was installed in the room was called "Non-Resident Alien." He said the project will hopefully be the start of what will turn into different ways of working with the student groups he has been meeting and learning from.

Another artist named Felicia Montes had her artwork on display as part of the "Otis College of Art and Design 2011 Graduate Public Practice Degree Exhibition."

"Art is a tool for education, empowerment, and transformation," Montes said.

The special guest for the evening's event was Carlos Montes, an activist during the Chicano Movement of the 1960s. Montes spoke of his memories of the past, and said, "What art is about is creating controversy. It's for making movement in your community."

Article courtesy of the Corsair of SMC.

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'Miradas' reveals how Mexican artists confronted modernity after Revolution

By Steve Bennett
sbennett@express-news.net

San Antonio's Witte Museum marked the centennial of the Mexican Revolution last year with its multifaceted exhibition “1910: A Revolution Across Borders.” Now the venerable institution examines the artistic legacy of that earth-shattering rip in society's fabric with a seismic summer show that traces the development of Mexican art over the past 80 years in some 100 works.

“Miradas: Mexican Art From the Bank of America Collection” features paintings, prints and photography by 32 artists, including Diego Rivera, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide and Rufino Tamayo, as well as contemporary artists such as Alejandro Colunga, Judithe Hernandez and Luis Jiménez.

“The ‘Revolution' show was very gritty,” says Marise McDermott, Witte president. “It really captured the violence of those times. This one explores the explosion of art across the U.S.-Mexico border.”

According to Cesáreo Moreno, chief curator and visual director at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, a furor of post-Revolution nationalism fueled the engines of creativity as Mexican artists rediscovered their country's past and peered ahead into its future.

“At the close of the war, an era of peace was ushered in gradually, with a different political order, a strong sense of nationalism — known as Mexicanidad (Mexican-ness) — and newfound social goals,” says Moreno, organizer of “Miradas,” a touring show culled from one of the country's strongest corporate collections. “Artists sought to develop an artistic language that could convey their sense of modernity in an increasingly industrialized world.”

Among the outlets of expression was a cultural movement known as Indigenismo (Indigenism or Indianism), Moreno says, pointing to “Miradas” paintings by Jean Charlot, a Zapotec mestizo born in Paris in 1898, and Guatemala native Carlos Mérida's series of lithographs reimagining the creation myths of the Popol Vuh.

“Artists and writers who participated in this movement explored their national heritage and proudly included in their work aspects of ancient Mesoamerican culture,” he says.

The Mexican mural movement emerged from the Revolution as well, and Los Tres Grandes (The Three Giants) — Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros — became Mexico's artistic ambassadors, global beacons who championed indigenous culture and the rights of the common man, even as they adopted and adapted international avant garde theories and methods.

Although a meditative suite of later (1968) Siqueiros lithographs dealing with family (“Mother and Child”) and community (“Village Dance”) is included here, visitors will find only one work by Rivera, who, as Witte curator of collections Amy Fulkerson points out, has a long history with the museum.

“The Witte was the first venue in San Antonio to exhibit Rivera, in 1927, so it's a nice connection to our history,” Fulkerson says.

Rivera's 1932 lithograph “The Teacher — The Fruits of School,” which looks like a pencil drawing at first glance, is a sensual work that “employs the classicizing style of Italian Renaissance fresco alongside the smooth elongated forms favored by the Cubists,” Moreno writes in exhibition materials. “His symbolic image valorizes popular education and implies it is planting the seeds of the nation's future.”

Photography occupies a longstanding and important niche in the history of Mexican art, and no exhibition chronicling the 20th century would be complete without Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the influential photographer whose work is such an important window on the world, as well as being a bridge from the past to the present.

The images here, which span the years from 1927 to 1972, capture a sense of Mexican daily life that only Alvarez Bravo could, with his unique vision. His '30s portrait of Frida Kahlo is absolutely majestic.

The most striking photographs in “Miradas,” however, are by Graciela Iturbide, born in 1942, who apprenticed with Alvarez Bravo — and perhaps has surpassed the master. Iturbide's lens found one of Mexico's most iconic images, which she titled “Mujer angel (Angel Woman),” depicting a young woman navigating the Sonora Desert, presumably heading north, with a boom box in her hand. It compresses so much political information into a single image.

The Chicano movement is epitomized in the work of Judithe Hernandez. The pioneering artist is represented here by a strong 2008 pastel on paper work from her Manos de sangre series.

“Red Hand, Bloody Hand, Hand of Oppression” encompasses nine small facial portraits of women in a grid format, as if they are caged or jailed. Bloody handprints are splashed on eyes, mouths, cheeks or necks, reflecting the artist's concern about the abuse of women. It's difficult not to think of the hundreds mysteriously murdered along the border when contemplating Hernandez's disturbing piece.

Many other works are worth discussing in “Miradas”: “There truly is something for everyone in ‘Miradas,'” Fulkerson says.

Can't miss works include a suite of prints by Luis Jiménez (check out “Bronco I”; nobody captured equine fury like Jiménez); the surreal folk narrative paintings of Alejandro Colunga, leader of the Nueva Mexicanidad movement; the “Rodeo Drive” series of Cibachrome prints dealing with rampant consumerism and the inequity of wealth by Los Angeles artist Anthony Hernandez; the symbolic paintings of self-taught artist Raymundo Andrade, who holds degrees in medicine and history, a fact that obviously influences his allegorical work; and Ricardo Rendon's large multimedia installation “Trabajo Diario (Daily Work),” which takes up two walls and features 31 consecutive front pages of the tabloid periodical La Jornada from August 2007.

“Miradas” visitors can't fail to linger over Javier Chavira's “El guerrero (Warrior),” which dominates the entry foyer to the exhibition, and in many ways embodies the dominant themes of the show: Chavira is a young Mexican American artist educated in the Midwest who draws on traditional Mexican sources of imagery, including indigenous sculpture, the Catholic Church and native folk art.

“In addition to producing drawings and paintings,” Moreno says, “Chavira has executed murals on schools and other buildings. ‘The Warrior,' with its architectonically rendered, monumentally proportioned head of an indigenous male, is reminiscent of Chavira's murals.”

In Spanish, the word mirada usually refers to a quick glimpse, but in the case of “Miradas,” it also can evoke a longer look, a deep, captivating gaze.

“Miradas” runs through Aug. 21 at the Witte Museum, 3801 Broadway in San Antonio, Tejas.

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