And now a message from the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

Director’s Message

It’s a conundrum, to be sure. What do you do when your longtime maid dies? After all, she practically raised your children. She cooked your eggs just so, lightly sprinkling them with something red. You asked her what, but you could not make out her response. (Sounded like “tapas”…) So do you send flowers to her family? Does she even have a family? Do you mention it in your year-end letter to friends and relatives? After all, she worked for you for almost forty years. These are delicate matters. It is what makes life in Hollywood so very challenging.

In 1976 Lupe Ontiveros earned her first role in Hollywood. She played a maid on Charlie’s Angels. Over the next thirty-six years she played, by her own account, more than 150 maids, holding her own against the likes of Jack Nicholson (twice). When she was not playing a maid, she played a prostitute or a madam. But she was also the patron saint of Chicano (and Latino) cinema, starring in now classic films: Zoot Suit, El Norte, Born in East L.A., My Family, … and the Earth Did Not Swallow Him, Selena, Chuck & Buck, Luminarias, and Real Women Have Curves. She had recurring roles in just about every Chicano-produced television series, and also Desperate Housewives. My personal favorite is her role as a drug lord in Taylor Hackford’s 1993 film Blood In, Blood Out. Without a doubt, her final shootout scene is matched in American cinema only by Queen Latifah’s in Set It Off. Lupe lived large on the silver screen.

Ontiveros passed away in July 2012 at age 69—much too early, to be sure. Yet she had an astounding career, especially in light of the limited roles available for Latino actors. Why, she even did voice work in an episode of Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy. So imagine my surprise when the Oscars did not include her in the “In Memoriam” segment. The Oscars also snubbed Russell Means, Sherman Hemsley, and Phyllis Diller. These oversights took place during an Oscar ceremony that one writer called “a lengthy celebration of xenophobia and misogyny” (The Nation). Another writer noted, “The more we pass off old stereotypes, rooted in hate, as normal—as MacFarlane did again and again last night—the longer those stereotypes, and their ability to harm people, will be in place” (The Atlantic). The Academy took the brunt of the blame, since its membership—similar to the declining viewership for the Oscar broadcast itself—is older (age 62 is the average), almost entirely white (94 percent), and mostly male (77 percent). The rationale for having MacFarlane as the host had to do with reaching out to a younger audience, which he did. The strategy relied heavily on what one writer called “the ironic hipster self-aware racism of ‘being so cool that we know it’s racist [and] that it’s ok to participate in it. We’re above it’” (Salon.com). Indeed, two Hollywood notables in the coveted 18 to 49 demographic received Oscars for creative work rooted in some form of racial masquerade: Quentin Tarantino and Ben Affleck. Of course such an approach overlooks the fact that non-whites made up more than half of all births and accounted for over 92 percent of population growth between 2000 and 2010. These are delicate matters, indeed. Earlier this week, the Academy quietly added Lupe Ontiveros to its online “In Memoriam” page.

Chon A. Noriega

Director and Professor

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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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Museums unite to chronicle post-war LA art scene

By Zorianna Kit

Reuters

More than 60 California cultural institutions are coming together to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene, in the largest such collaboration ever undertaken in the region.

Southern California museums and university programs such as the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Chicano Studies Research Center will take part in the 2011-2012 event, titled "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A 1945-1980", organizers said on Thursday.

Each of the institutions will make a contribution to the story of art and social change in Los Angeles through simultaneous exhibitions and programs.

"What began as an effort to document the milestones in this region's artistic history has expanded until it is now becoming a great creative landmark in itself," said Deborah Marrow, interim president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which has initiated the event through grants totaling $10 million.

"We know that this era has had a million moments of impact on arts and culture across the United States and beyond," added Mark Siegel, chairman of the Getty's Board of Trustees.

The event will begin in October 2011 and will run through April 2012 at locations including Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Palm Springs.

The exhibitions, festivals and programs will showcase the influence of post-war California architecture, Pop Art, the emergence of African-American artists and 1970s feminist performance art.

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They’re Chicanos and Artists. But Is Their Art Chicano?

... It has long been said that the identity-based show is an evil whose necessity would disappear in a more equitable world, but museums and grant-giving foundations will continue to support this kind of project because of its appeal to various interest groups. In truth, it as much a bureaucratic artifact as a curatorial one.





Photos by Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times

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By KEN JOHNSON
NY Times

Is it time to retire the identity-based group show? Back in the 1970s, exhibitions devoted to the work of women, blacks, gay people, American Indians and other disenfranchised groups brought into the mainstream all kinds of new styles and ideas. They changed the course of modern art history.

If it is hard to imagine that sort of exhibition making waves now, there is good reason. Artists of many different backgrounds and sexual orientations have been assimilated into the art world. There are more women than men in this year’s Whitney Biennial. Questions of equitable representation probably will never go away, but at this point, many artists would balk at being included in an identity-based show. They want to go to the big dance.

These thoughts were occasioned by “Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement,” a confused and confusing exhibition at El Museo del Barrio presenting works by Mexican-Americans who have come of age since the 1990s. In the catalog the exhibition’s curators acknowledge that some artists who were invited declined to be in a “surname-based” show. (The exhibition was organized by Rita Gonzalez and Howard N. Fox, curators at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it opened in April 2008, and Chon A. Noriega, of the Chicano Studies Research Center of the University of California, Los Angeles.)

In his foreword to the catalog, Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles museum, observes that the 27 artists and collectives in the show are not grouped “by their own volition or consensus.” Selecting by ethnicity is “a curatorial artifact, a device to reflect and speculate on the issues facing Chicano artists today.”

It becomes readily apparent that the artists are not unified by any single style or conceptual approach. The work ranges from Victor Estrada’s funky-surrealist paintings to Sandra de la Loza’s complicated installation of old documents and a digitally manipulated video dedicated to Fort Moore, a historic site in Los Angeles.

Few pieces resemble the ideologically charged paintings and graphics of the Chicano movement, which blossomed in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Christina Fernandez’s large color photographs of laundromats represent an experience that people from many backgrounds know intimately. Without the works’ titles, you would not know that Delilah Montoya’s sumptuous, wide-angle landscape photographs depict stopping places on illegal-immigrant trails out of Mexico. Turning ugly subjects into beautiful pictures is something photographers do all over the world.

Some works relate to Chicano art, but with knowing, retrospective sophistication. Carolyn Castaño’s brightly painted, cartoonish portraits of pretty Mexican women surrounded by flocked and glittery stripes or floral patterns could be mistaken for cheap beauty parlor décor (in a good way). Folksy, signlike paintings and cases displaying sneakers and sandals made of painted cardboard by Gary Garay similarly refer to low-budget commerce and extend to the present the Chicano movement’s affectionate embrace of “low-brow” Mexican-American culture.

Eduardo Sarabia’s room covered with faux-antique blue-on-white tiles with emblematic designs alluding to the drug wars adroitly combines popular tradition and contemporary political savvy. And Alejandro Diaz’s display of distressed cardboard signs bearing hand-written messages, like “I beg to differ” and “Wet Back by Popular Demand,” play with themes of homelessness and racism with unusual good humor. He first exhibited them while wearing a white suit outside of Tiffany & Company in New York.

The most impressive effort in this quasi-populist vein is Margarita Cabrera’s sculpture of a full-size yellow Volkswagen Beetle, a car that was produced in Mexico from 1967 to 2003. Made of mainly sewn-together pieces of colored vinyl, it evokes the soft sculpture of Claes Oldenburg. According to the catalog, it also draws attention to the poor working conditions of industrial laborers in Mexico.

The curators explain in the catalog that the point of the exhibition is not to show the evolution of a particular visual or formal style but to demonstrate how Mexican-American artists have adapted mainstream conceptual strategies to more local concerns. It is the top-down opposite of the Chicano movement, which raised conventions of popular culture into the realm of high art, and it looks as if the biggest influence on most of these artists were M.F.A. programs.

“Black on Black,” a sculpture by Juan Capistran consisting of a black Minimalist slab leaning against another bent one, as if with sexual intent, looks like the sort of postmodernist riff on formalist abstraction associated with artists like Peter Halley, Sherrie Levine and countless others who have toyed with Modernist semiotics.

Finish-fetish-style panel paintings by Rubén Ortiz-Torres, rendered in glossy and glittery auto-body paint, conflate Modernist abstraction and custom-car painting. “Rigor Motors,” a pair of sculptures in the form of coffins by Ruben Ochoa and Marco Rios — one is half upright with an automobile bucket seat inside — allude to a car culture of death.

Death is more grimly invoked by Ken Gonzales-Day’s display of old postcards bearing pictures of people standing around under trees. Before selective erasure by the artist, they depicted lynched Mexican-Americans, and thus symbolize a pernicious historic amnesia.

Taken altogether, it is not clear what this show says about today’s Mexican-American artists. Are they doing something unusual that the art world needs to catch up on? Not those in this show. Is it news that they are as creatively diverse as American artists in general? It should not be.


It has long been said that the identity-based show is an evil whose necessity would disappear in a more equitable world, but museums and grant-giving foundations will continue to support this kind of project because of its appeal to various interest groups. In truth, it as much a bureaucratic artifact as a curatorial one. A more astutely focused, judiciously selected exhibition might lead to different conclusions, but this one will not alter the impression that last rites for this type of show are in order.

“Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement” continues through May 9 at El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street, East Harlem; (212) 831-7272, elmuseo.org.

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