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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Photographer Harry Gamboa's Passion and Activism

By Brian De Los Santos, CSUN

Professor Harry Gamboa Jr.’s said he is often inspired by everyday people in ordinary scenarios for his artwork. Photo Credit: Herber Lovato / Assistant Photo Editor

Professor Harry Gamboa Jr.’s first masterpiece involved a couple cans of spray paint and a wall at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art which served as his canvas.

In 1972, Gamboa and two other members of his art entourage,Asco (Spanish for nauseated), had asked a museum curator at LACMA why Chicano art was nonexistent in the museum and he told them Latinos did not partake in art but rather in gangs.

The art group responded by tagging their names on the right corner of the museum around 4 a.m., making the building itself a work of art produced by Chicanos.

The black and red graffiti had brief physical existence of about seven hours.

“It was a way to play the term he had used,” he said.

The piece, now know as Spray Paint LACMA, is one of many that have contributed to Gamboa’s reputation as an artist and voice for the underdog.

He’s been described as a “pioneer for art in action” by performance artists like Maris Bustamante, while his colleagues describe him as a humble man with an immense influence.

His avant-garde skills have allowed him to touch multiple realms in the world of art. His work, with its political activist notion, has not ceased to deliver messages to the masses.

However, on the CSUN campus, Harry Gamboa Jr., a world-renowned Chicano artist, is known for a different role as teacher.

Although he currently teaches a remedial writing class, Gamboa has taught art, theater, cinema, photography and Chicana/o studies at various UC campuses, as well as the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia and Otis.

He has also lectured at Harvard University, UC Berkley, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Centro Cultural de España, Mexico City and several others.

But long before stepping into his role as a teacher and lecturer, Gamboa pursued his passion for art, activism and people.

The East LA native began his career as an artist in the early 1970s, when he was an editor for several magazines.

The experience from those publications developed his unique eye for design, something that he is known for.

The artist has explored a plethora of artistic platforms, from photography to murals, film and canvas.

Gamboa also tried his hand at writing, producing several poems, books and essays, which have been used as academic course readers, as well. Most of his pieces are politically inclined, translating an idea onto a medium of art.

Human rights and activism have played a major role in Gamboa’s life since the 1960s, when he stood as one of the students who fought for education reform when the Chicano movement was being developed and the “East LA Walkout” occurred.

As part of the movement, Gamboa delivered speeches, spoke with the media regarding the subject, involved other youth and mentored protestors. He was fully involved, hoping to alter an education system that did not favor minorities at the time.

Gamboa said in comparison to the 60s and the education protests today, back then “it was a life or death situation” because it was either being drafted or accepted into school.

“It was imminently to stop the war,” he said.

He also battled the military drafts with protests against the Vietnam War.

“I was very interested and always pointing out the inconsistencies of what was being told to us versus what was real,” Gamboa said.

He added that during the early 1970s, today’s communication technology was absent, therefore many people created “things that were not real.”

Gamboa’s solution was to tell stories through photographs, which became his craft and expression of choice.

“My focus early on (in art) was always about establishing rumors and myths,” he said. “In the end that is kind of what I still do.”

Gamboa went on to say that through his art he enjoys generating interest, creating excitement, presenting new ideas or images that have not been expressed before.

He said he draws inspiration from everyday people in everyday circumstances and transforms the ordinary scenario into an extraordinary work of art. For example, Gamboa said when he steps onto a bus, he documents his journey with writings or photographic scenes from the common people who crowd the seats.

“It’s the idea that I can photograph an individual who had previously been under the affects of negative stereotyping, then bring that image and transform the concept of whom this person represents,” Gamboa said. “Not only does it become art, but it also becomes something included in the (mainstream) dialogue, cancelling out the negative stereotypes.”

His passion for activism and human rights has not wavered over the years. Most recently, the artist has rallied for immigrant rights and education and has drawn artistic inspiration from the causes.

Gamboa’s most recent projects, Aztlangst, a photonovela (graphic novel), is aimed to interpret the story of oppressed groups such as those who are being affected by Arizona’s controversial immigration law.

“(The graphic novel is based on) people who are in hiding, who are operating on a different level of awareness because they are being hunted down,” Gamboa said.

He said that he is also in the process of completing Pix, a collection of his favorite photography work from the 1970s to recent years.

“I found it my calling in life to to minor events and to transform and give them a historic nature even though they might not be worthy of history,” Gamboa said. “(I want) to have fun trying to create change.”

Junior Natalia Baires, 21, psychology, a former student of Gamboa’s, described his impact on her life as both a “privilege and bizarre.”

“(I feel) privileged because he was a good professor and bizarre because he did so much to fight for Chicanos,” Baires said. “It is weird to know that this humble and ordinary looking man did all that plus more.”

Over the span of his 30 year career, his work has attained world-wide attention and has been exhibited in acclaimed museums like the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Guadalajara, Mexico, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Smithsonian Institution and the list goes on.

Dr. Denisse Sandoval, CSUN Chicana/o studies instructor, has known Gamboa for about 16 years and has been included in his art troupe since 2004. She also participated in photo shoots for Aztlagnst and other projects.

Sandoval said Gamboa’s gift is his unique view of the world.

“When you see that little tinkle in his eye, that’s little trouble maker in his life,” she said. “And that is what makes him a fabulous artist.”

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Renowned Latino Performance Artist Harry Gamboa Jr. to Appear at Smithsonian American Art Museum

The Smithsonian Latino Center and the Smithsonian American Art Museum will present renowned Latino performance artist Harry Gamboa Jr. in “Erased: Limits and Borders” Jan. 27 at 7 p.m. in the museum’s McEvoy Auditorium. The program will include a Q-and A period, moderated by Dr. E. Carmen Ramos, curator of Latino art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and will be followed by a book signing with Gamboa in the museum’s G Street Lobby. Two of Gamboa’s works, Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr. (University Of Minnesota Press, 1998) and Fallen (CreateSpace, 2010), will be available for purchase at the museum store, which will remain open until 8:30 p.m. This program is free and open to the public.

Gamboa will reflect on the social and personal conditions of Chicanos during the second half of the 20th century that led to the development of Asco as an art collective and response to various urban stimuli. He will continue by incorporating the use of visual language in conjunction with social cues, stylized forms of prose and dramatic scripting to generate/dispel myths in the barrio and beyond. Gamboa will explore and discuss the use of live stage performances, mail art and printed text as well as his role as artist who has informed others that Chicano cultural attributes are not dependent on mainstream Hollywood negative stereotypes. The program will include a PowerPoint presentation with many images that Gamboa has produced from 1972 to 2010 related to his work.

Since 1972, Gamboa has been actively creating works in various media/forms that document and interpret the contemporary urban Chicano experience. He is probably best known for his work with the East Los Angeles-based performance group that he co-founded called Asco (Spanish for nausea). Asco performed regularly in the street/public art scene from 1972 to 1987 staging a number of events that underscored the potentially explosive social and racial conditions in LA and helped to place these issues in a larger international context.

Gamboa’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saone, France; Museo de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara, México; and the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland among others. His work has also been featured in publications, including La Opinión, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Art Review (London), The Christian Science Monitor, Actuel (Paris), Reforma (Mexico City) and The Village Voice. He is a member of the faculty at California Institute of the Arts, School of Art, Program in Photography and Media. He also lectures for Chicano/a Studies Department at California State University, Northridge. For more information visit http://harrygamboajr.com.

The Smithsonian Latino Center is the division of the Smithsonian Institution that ensures that Latino contributions to art, science and the humanities are highlighted, understood and advanced through the development and support of public programs, scholarly research, museum collections and educational opportunities at the Smithsonian Institution and its affiliated organizations across the United States and internationally. Website: http://latino.si.edu

The Smithsonian American Art Museum celebrates the vision and creativity of Americans with artworks in all media spanning more than three centuries. The museum’s pioneering collection includes more than 500 works by Latino artists collected during the past 30 years. It is located at Eighth and F streets N.W. Museum hours are 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily, except Dec. 25. Admission is free. Follow the museum on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, ArtBabble, iTunes and YouTube. Museum information (recorded): (202) 633-7970. Smithsonian Information: (202) 633-1000;

CONTACT:
Media Only:

Danny López (202) 633-0804; lopezd@si.edu
Mandy Young, American Art (202) 633-8529; youngak@si.edu
Sitio web para los medios: http://newsdesk.si.edu

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