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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Stuart Ashman appointed head of Museum of Latin American Art

The Museum of Latin American Art of Long Beach, CA said that it has appointed Stuart Ashman as its new president and chief executive officer. His tenure is set to begin on Sept. 6.

Ashman assumes the museum's top post following the abrupt departure of Richard P. Townsend in January. Townsend had served as president of the museum for a little less than two years before announcing his resignation. Prior to Townsend, the position had been vacant for more than a year.

The museum received an endowment of $25 million in 2009 from the estate of its late founder, Dr. Robert Gumbiner.

Ashman has served as director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico. He was also founding director of the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe. Ashman served as cabinet secretary for the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs for more than seven years.

In the past year, Ashman served as an advisor for the U.S. Peace Corps, working on arts-related programs in a number of Latin American countries.

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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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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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Chicano art, beyond rebellion

'Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement' provides a rare showcase at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

By Agustin Gurza, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Visitors to the sprawling Chicano art show opening today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are greeted by a display of photos depicting a group of daring guerrilla street artists known as ASCO, Spanish for "nausea." The photographs are from the early 1970s -- which seems to defy the show's title, "Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement."

In one famous photo from 1972, in the midst of the movement, the museum itself was the target of these Dadaesque subversives protesting the exclusion of Chicano art from its galleries. In "Spray Paint LACMA," ASCO member Patssi Valdez is seen posing outside the museum's walls, which had been tagged overnight by her rebellious cohorts, Gronk, Willie Herron III and Harry Gamboa Jr. This act of creative defiance -- turning the building into a Chicano canvas -- is now enshrined in the very place that sparked the protest by treating Chicanos as the phantoms of the art world. So does this mean that Chicano artists have finally found the acceptance they sought? That they can now put down their spray cans and pursue careers as equals in a harmonious "post-ethnic" art world?

"I have a feeling if I was a young person today, I don't think I would spray paint the museum," Gamboa, 56, an author and college lecturer, answers slyly. "Because now, [tagging] has been felonized, and to put three signatures on a county building might result in three strikes. Who knows if we would all wind up in prison for life and never have the chance to pursue careers as artists?"

Half the artists in the current exhibition weren't even born when Gamboa and company tagged the museum, but they carry on the ASCO conceptual tradition by expressing their own set of social concerns in bold, albeit at times oblique, ways. Thus, the choice of ASCO as preamble is an intriguing invitation to rethink Chicano art, past and present.

"Phantom Sightings" (a phrase adapted from Gamboa's writings) features more than 120 works, including 10 commissioned specifically for the occasion, by 31 artists from across the country, some of whom don't call themselves Chicano. Most came of age in the 1990s and several have just recently started to draw international attention. Three -- Ruben Ochoa, Eduardo Sarabia and Mario Ybarra Jr. -- are currently represented in the sometimes reputation-making Whitney Biennial in New York.

Curated by Rita Gonzalez, Howard Fox and Chon Noriega, this is the first major Chicano group exhibition presented at LACMA since 1987's "Hispanic Art in the United States," which was organized by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. And it is the first such show organized for LACMA itself in more than three decades, since its ground-breaking "Chicanismo en el Arte" in 1975 and "Los Four" the year before.

Unlike past Chicano art shows that focused heavily on paintings, the new collection highlights work in an array of styles and formats, including sculpture, mixed-media installations, photo-based pieces and so-called interventions, art that interjects itself in public spaces or social settings. Since much of the work is conceptual, "Phantom Sightings" is likely to leave some viewers scratching their heads, needing help deciphering what artists had in mind with animated blobs that change shape (Rubén Ortiz Torres) or droopy replicas of kitchen appliances made of vinyl (Margarita Cabrera). Essays and artist bios are included in a 240-page companion catalog that is bound to become a reference work.

Variety, not ethnicity, is the show's hallmark. Artist Ken Gonzales-Day deals with the lynching of Mexican Americans in California by digitally erasing the victims from historic photos. Sandra de la Loza, meanwhile, fills in the gaps that history erased by placing plaques (that are quickly removed) in places such as the whitewashed Siqueiros mural at Olvera Street. And Julio Cesar Morales reveals the resourcefulness of immigrants trying to cross the border illegally by exposing them in their hiding places, such as the little girl inside a piñata, through transparent water-color illustrations based on real cases.

The art is by turns provocative, fanciful, stunning, strange and even noisy, in the case of one audio installation titled "Migrant Dubs." Fox calls the show "a visually cacophonous and unruly thing." To some extent, it reflects the hardscrabble barrios where some of these artists were nurtured. That street aesthetic is reflected in the design for the exhibition, with rough-hewn plywood structures, and in signage and promotions using old-fashioned wheat paste posters.

Big expectations

The show is generating intense expectations, partly due to how rarely the museum turns its attention to Chicano art in its own backyard, as opposed to Mexican or Latin American art. Galleries from Santa Monica to East L.A. are staging shows to ride the coattails of "Phantom Sightings."

Even for the few midcareer artists in the show, participation can mean validation. "It's wonderful that I'm showing with a lot of up-and-coming or emerging artists," says Delilah Montoya, 52, a Texas-based photographer. "It makes me feel as though I've been going down the right track."

But the show is also stirring debate, starting with the subtitle, which draws its own line of partition: "Art After the Chicano Movement." It suggests not only a generational but an aesthetic break with Chicano artists who emerged during the civil rights struggle, known for illustrative paintings and murals, political content and traditional iconography, such as revolutionaries, lowriders and the Virgin of Guadalupe.

With its emphasis on younger artists who don't wear their ethnicities on their canvases, "Phantom Sightings" seems to be inaugurating a "post-ethnic" Chicano era. Coming at the height of a presidential campaign in which some hail Sen. Barack Obama as the first "post racial" candidate, the timing seems propitious.

Yet some worry that implication is demeaning. "The inherited plight and struggle and history of the Chicano art movement is not one you can toy with, not without expecting any sort of questioning," says Reyes Rodriguez, director of Tropico de Nopal, a gallery near downtown that has exhibited several of the artists in the show. "Do we just keep quiet and allow LACMA to declare that Chicano art is dead? What does that really mean? That you want to be more European or more a part of, let's call it the Anglo world, or whatever it is that validates you? Is that really success? Do we not have a voice of our own?"

The notion of ethnic identity as passé is pervasive in contemporary American society, not only in the arts but in pop music, politics, journalism and literature. At some art schools, being post-ethnic is almost an admission requirement. Yet some young artists still question the burden that the post-racial ethos places exclusively on racial minorities.

"People say multiculturalism is dead and we're, like, 'OK, when's the post-white show?' " says Eamon Ore-Giron, who holds an MFA from UCLA and collaborated on the "Migrant Dubs" exhibit. "Nowadays, it's almost as if your identity is erased, in a lot of ways. But at the same time, you are who you are, and that's what you're going to represent."

"Phantom Sightings" emerged from LACMA's Latino Arts Initiative, launched in 2004 under former director Andrea Rich and designed as a collaboration between the museum and UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center. Noriega was named an adjunct curator and put in charge of the five-year plan to develop exhibitions, publications and other projects.

One of the projects already on the books then was a plan to exhibit highlights from the Chicano art collection of actor and comedian Cheech Marin. That show, a spinoff of Marin's larger exhibition called "Chicano Visions," is now scheduled to open at LACMA in June under the title "Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.: Selections From the Cheech Marin Collection."

What the news release about the initiative did not mention was the contentious, behind-the-scenes negotiations between Marin and the museum, which originally turned down his show outright. The actor threatened to go public with the issue before museum officials agreed to the scaled-down version of "Chicano Visions," which has since toured the country to sold-out and sometimes record crowds.

The museum's initial resistance, explains Noriega, was based on its reluctance to showcase private collections.

But Marin scoffs at the rationale, pointing to LACMA's gleaming new wing named after billionaire developer Eli Broad, who lent his collection for display. "It was ironic to me," says Marin. "You would think L.A. would be the first museum to sign up for the show. But, in fact, it was the last."

The very timing of these back-to-back shows raises some questions. Is the museum again signaling a generational split? Is it drawing a line between the young artists of "Phantom Sightings" and the older ones in the "Marin Collection"?

"I would hope not," says Noriega. "I would hope that people would attend both shows and come out and go, 'Wow, these are some pretty big bookends for a category called Chicano art! I would like to see some of the stuff that comes in between.' "

"Phantom Sightings" does not attempt to present a survey of Chicano art from the last show to the present, as if the museum were trying to pick up where it left off in 1975. "We thought it would be a disservice to the field to do that kind of show because in some ways it would sanction the idea that institutions can kind of catch up every one to three decades," says Noriega. "Besides, it's an impossible task, in many ways doomed to failure like the Whitney Biennial. No, we do much better if we accept the institution's commitment to ongoing activity in this area."

Changing times

Contemporary Chicano artists are working in a social environment vastly different from the days of the Chicano movement. In Los Angeles, to begin with, the Latino population has boomed, putting demographic pressure on cultural institutions to respond. Recurrent waves of immigrants constantly revive the issues of marginalization and social acceptance, even as the offspring of previous generations progress up the social ladder, taking leadership roles as politicians, academics and curators, which were practically nonexistent 30 years ago.

Most of the artists in "Phantom Sightings" were born in the 1970s and live and work in Los Angeles. The oldest is 52 (not counting ASCO); the youngest 27. All have advanced degrees, 20 with masters of fine arts, most from California schools. Only two were born in Mexico.

Whether they call themselves Chicano or not, several artists explore issues of class and culture inherent in their backgrounds. In many cases, artists transform mundane objects from their everyday experience to make imaginative or pointed statements with the byproduct.

El Paso artist Adrian Esparza, for example, unspools the threads of a multicolored Mexican serape to create an abstract geometric pattern, thereby "taking artisanal traditions and using them in a postmodern way," as Fox puts it. Margarita Cabrera, also from El Paso, uses fabric from U.S. Border Patrol uniforms to create realistic cactus sculptures that conjures "a conceptual link between an unforgiving landscape and the relatively recent criminalization of border crossing," as Noriega explains in the catalog.

Perhaps the most obvious example of the mundane exalted as art is Ochoa's use of his family's tortilla delivery truck as a mobile art gallery. The L.A.-based artist emptied the interior of the slab-sided 1985 Chevy van and "just tricked it out" with white walls, track lighting and linoleum flooring and invited his friends to create projects for the road.

He called it "Class C," for the DMV's commercial license category, and did 75 shows from 2001 to 2005, "bringing contemporary art to the neighborhood and not dumbing it down." "I was the collaborator, curator, driver, installer and mechanic," says Ochoa, one of five artists in the exhibition who attended Otis College of Art and Design and one of six with MFAs from UC Irvine. "I'd move it around as far as my Triple-A miles would take me because it would break down and I had to tow it back."

Ochoa, born in Oceanside to Mexican immigrants, was practically raised inside that van, recruited like so many of his first-generation peers to work in their parents' business. Yet he represents a new generation of Chicanos who want to be identified primarily by their work, not their background, even though their barrio shapes their art.

"It's laid in the work, but it doesn't have to be highlighted," he says. "A lot of my work deals with different class tensions, boundaries and barriers, but it doesn't have to be solely the Mexican American experience."

For Gamboa, the former ASCO tagger, it doesn't matter what you call it as long as you give it a chance. "It's always been my contention that Chicanos are a co-equal culture and capable of participating and sharing and contributing," he says. "At some level, [the show] just gives people hope that it's possible to actually create work and have it recognized as being art."

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