'Galeria 4.0': Retrospective, Galeria de la Raza

[Click image by SFGate to enlarge]

Galeria de la Raza may have been born out of the 1960s Chicano movement, but it has managed to remain relevant for 40 years.

The art studio in San Francisco's Mission District has served Latino artists since it was founded in 1970. Its 40-year retrospective exhibition, "Galeria 4.0," is designed around concepts that encapsulate Latino art over the years.

Those concepts derive from the Chicano civil rights movement, during which artists reclaimed their Mexican American ethnicity and culture via art.

"Basically we looked at the Chicano art movement and the Galeria's place in that movement," said Raquel de Anda, the Galeria's associate curator. "What's beautiful about it is it's very porous and the concepts bleed from one to another."

In the past four decades, Latino artists the world over have been embraced here through a common thread of passionate work steeped in community pride and cultural activism.

"Galeria 4.0" boasts acclaimed artists such as José Antonio Burciaga, whose work is juxtaposed with that of young talent such as Mitsy Avila Ovalles and Rio Yañez.

Yañez essentially comes from Chicano art royalty - his parents are Yolanda Lopez and Rene Yañez, one of the gallery's founding members - yet he's crafted his own techniques and style while remaining true to an art movement his parents helped create.

Work from Rio Yañez's "Ghetto Frida: Mission Memories" series is featured in the show, where he reinterpreted Frida Kahlo as a modern-day chola, replete with distinctive tattoos of teardrops falling from her right eye and "Diego" tattooed on her neck. The series is set in the Mission against such symbolic landmarks as the New Mission movie theater.

Many of the outdoor billboard mock-ups, like Rio Yañez's, that have graced the Galeria are being showcased, along with other emblems of the studio's past, like tear sheets from calendars that local artists used to produce.

"There's so much history, so it's difficult to meld 40 years of Latino artwork, but hopefully it'll start conversations about the Mission," de Anda said of the exhibition. "Something the Galeria has always tended to do is educate. There's going to be a lot of history here and vignettes and lessons about Chicano art and how it's broken out of its framework in a lot of ways."

Other portions of the show offer a Día de los Muertos display and other installations involving video and photo. What it comes down to, de Anda said, is an exhibition that reinforces the studio's roots.

"The Galeria has always been about voicing and creating a space for people who have been stifled or ignored," de Anda said. "The times have changed, but there's still a need for that."

Through Jan. 29. 1-7 p.m. Tues., noon-6 p.m. Wed.-Sat. Galeria de la Raza, 2857 24th St., S.F. www.galeriadelaraza.org.

- Danielle Samaniego, 96hours@sfchronicle.com

This article appeared on page G - 14 of the San Francisco Chronicle

The State of Latin American Art

Dr Mari Carmen Ramirez, Wortham Curator of Latin American Art and Director, International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, discusses Latin American Art at the Aspen Ideas Festival

What follows are my notes based on a talk given by Dr. Mari Carmen Ramirez at the Aspen Ideas Festival, July 10, 2010:

The ICAA:
The International Center for Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston is a unique resource center for the study of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art. Established in 2001, its mission is to transform perceptions of Latin American and Latino Art and open new avenues of intercultural dialogue and exchange. The ICAA's signature initiative is the Documents of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art: A Digital Archive and Publications Project whose web-based digital archive - which is scheduled to launch in the Fall of 2011 - will provide free universal access to key writings by artists, artistic movements, critics, and curators from Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the United States.

The Problem:
Much of Latin American and Latino Art of the 20th century is poorly documented. The market, particularly the international market, for much of the work was not developed until relatively recently. For example, Sotheby's only created a category for Latin American Art in 1979 and there is no category or mainstream market for Latino art. An accessible resource that taps into the intellectual foundations of this art is needed.

The ICAA at Houston is now ten years old.

Our principal goals are to:
Recover and digitally publish primary and critical documents relevant to Latin American and Latino art of the 20th Century.

Provide open access to these documents for all those interested in 20th century Latin American and Latino Art.

Publish selections of these documents in the form of thematic anthologies that will complement the digital archive.

Establish a dynamic digital archive and research program devoted to providing a sound basis of scholarship for this work.

Recovery:
As part of our efforts we have initiated a systematic effort to recover original documents relevant to Latin American and Latino Art of the 20th century. This effort is encompassed by the ICAA's Documents Project. These include key documents from the artist's own papers and collections as well as contemporaneous press and art criticism. Our work is made difficult by a precarious infrastructure in many of the countries, poor distribution and lack of policies aimed at preserving books, archival material, and key documents.

Curate:
To address these and other issues we have created a "think tank" comprised of scholars and experts on the art produced along this cultural axis who generously contribute their expertise and are helping the ICAA further our goal to preserve and make accessible documents that will change perceptions of Latin American and Latino art. To date, the Center has published 11 books and catalogs and held 4 major international symposia.

Access:
We have established regional centers for the study of Latin American Art in 10 cities that include: Buenos Aires (Argentina), Santiago/Valparaiso (Chile), São Paulo (Brazil), Lima (Peru), Caracas (Venezuela), Bogotá (Colombia), Mexico City, Los Angeles, South Bend (Indiana), and Houston. The project also has research affiliates in San Juan (Puerto Rico), Miami, and New York. In each location we recover documents, scan and digitize them, catalogue and annotate them. Beginning in Fall 2011, we will make them all publicly available, free of charge, in the project's specially designed Website. Through this monumental undertaking, we are creating a "multinational super information highway."

This data is intended to provide a sound intellectual foundation for the long-term growth and development of the field of Latin American and Latino art. Our hope is that this archive will help fill gaps in the worldwide knowledge and appreciation of this art as well provide the necessary research tools for scholars, students, collectors, museum and arts professional, and anyone else interested in this art.

Scholarship:
At present we have over 100 researchers distributed amongst the ten project sites. Our headquarters are in Houston. The project's team members include senior and junior art historians, researchers, librarians, IT specialists, editors, translators, and administrators. We are governed by a 17-member Editorial Board and a 10-member steering committee. By the time we launch the project's website in Fall 2011 we will have a collection of over 10,000 critical document and more than 55,000 related images. We are committed to continue to expand this archive which, in theory at least, is limitless.

By art world standards, in which the perceived glamor resides in promoting artists and organizing exhibitions, the often tedious work of archiving and documenting is hardly enticing. The ICAA's work, in particular, is mostly behind the scenes and has an assembly line character. However, it fulfills the indispensable role of adding the crucial information and context to exhibitions and publications that enable a deeper appreciation of the art presented.

Several illustrations of the type of documents collected were shown in photos. These include photos artists at work, artists' notes, contemporary newspaper reviews, and gallery handouts.

Examples:
The profusely illustrated documents by Caracas' radical collective El Techo de la Ballena
-Luis Felipe Noé's art criticism of the 1950s (Argentina)
- Brazil's "Ruptura Manifesto"
-Documentation of a series of debates between Antonio Berni and David Alfaro Siqueiros in Argentina during 1933
- The precursory responses to a survey published in Havana's Revista de avance from 1927 to 1929 that debated the existence and definition of the concept of Latin American art
-The critical work of the Guatemala-born, Mexico City-based artist, Carlos Mérida that illuminates the work of other artists at a time when there was little established art criticism of their work.
-The recipes for colors and tonalities developed by Hélio Oiticica, the Brazilian avant-garde artist, for his Grand Nucleus installation (1960-68)

In 2011 we will launch the ICAA digital archive. The archive will be a free online resource for all. Simultaneous to the launching of the site, the ICAA will publish the first volume in the parallel Critical Documents of Latin American and Latino Art book series, 13 thematic anthologies that will provide English translations for documents from the online resource. Our hope is that the web-based archive and the book series will provide a visible space of Latin American Art in the United States and elsewhere and will transmit a rich legacy of knowledge to future generations.

Questions from the audience.

Q: Have we transcended the need for Latin American Specialists?
MCR: Absolutely not. Latin American Art is now mainstream yet there are still huge gaps in our understanding of the thousands of artists and movements at work in the more than twenty countries that make up the region throughout the 20th century. There is a lot of information out there about the contemporary manifestations of this art but very little serious historical scholarship. The field has grown horizontally yet lacks depth. This is what the ICAA's Documents Project is trying to address. We need a high degree of scholarship to support the understanding and appreciation of Latin American and Latino art in both its historical and contemporary manifestations.

Promoters of the global view argue that Latin American art is now global, yet we need to bear in mind that all art is both local and global. We cannot side-step the local and what it implies in terms of the contextual factors affecting the emergence and development of a particular form of art. Latin American art is no exception.

What is really at stake behind the "global" position is a market-driven, economic process that has transformed the status of Latin American art in contemporary artistic circuits. Globalization has turned Latin American art into a strategic economic resource. Over the last 10-15 year this art has become a favorite commodity in the current market, providing additional justification for careful scholarship and documentation. Curiously, all this attention has created a movement to re-regionalize, a tendency which calls for expert knowledge such as the one that the ICAA is trying to provide.

A persistent issue in the field is that Latin American art has traditionally been considered to be derivative. Those of us working in this field over the last three decades have set out to prove that this is not the case. Since the early 20th century, Latin American artists have engaged in original research. They have made important theoretical contributions to art and aesthetics and have produced forms of art that in many cases have anticipated important developments in Europe and the United States. To understand these developments we need to get roots of this art and understand its development in depth. This can only be done through key writings and other documentation that shed light on the intellectual process that nurtured the art. This is the ultimate goal of the ICAA Documents project.

Q: What is Latin American Art and what is Latino Art? How do they differ?
MCR: Latin American Art is an operational term used to describe art actually made in the more than twenty countries that make up Latin America and that encompass Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Latino art refers to the work of artists of Latin American origin (usually by birth, family ties, or education) who work primarily in the United States.

Q: Doesn't the term Latino Art unfairly segregate artists? After all do we call Pollock a Polish-American Artist or de Kooning a Dutch-American artist? What do we call artists of Latin American origin who were born in the US?
MCR: I do not believe that the term Latin American or Latino Art is segregating as we use it. As I have said, this is another pressing reason why we need to document this work and also, I believe, to study this art in the social milieu in which it arose, either in Latin America or the United States. We do want to understand the social context of the work. We do want to examine patterns of inversion or assimilation of received artistic tenets.
We call artists of Latin American origin living in the United States "Latinos." This is a political term that signals the largest ethnic majority in the United States at present. The use of this term does not segregate these artists, instead it brings attention upon their roots and cultural heritage. As an ascendant minority, these artists need legitimization. We do have Museums of African American Art in the United States and there is a National Museum of Women's Art. However, I believe Latinos are best served by displaying their art next to the art of other groups, particularly North American, European, and even Asian artists.

Q: Does your center also include architecture as art? Are you collecting original drawings by Latin American architects as does MOMA for example?
MCR: No. At the moment our collection does not include architecture.

Q: Will you extend your collection and research to Colonial Art of Latin America?
MCR: We may extend our collection to include colonial art, but have no plans at present to expand our research and documentation work in this area. Other institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Denver Art Museum have established programs dedicated to Colonial Art. We gain by dividing the effort.

Q: And Chicano Art?
MCR: Both our research and our collection include "Chicano Art" (the art of Mexican-Americans, mostly living in California, Texas and the Southwest). To that effect, we have partnered with other research centers devoted to Chicano Art, such as UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center and the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies.

Q: And Puerto Rican Art?
MCR: It is interesting that both Chicano and Puerto Rican art in the United States form an important part of the Civil Rights legacy and dialog. The Documents Project has actively collected documentation on both island-based Puerto Rican art as well as Nuyorican art in the United States through partnerships and researchers ceded at the University of Puerto Rico's museum in San Juan and Hunter College's Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York City, respectively.

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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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