One city, five exhibitions, more than eighty artists. An unprecedented view of Chicano art. Organized by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and curated by Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas
L.A. Xicano is a unique collaboration between the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and three major Los Angeles museums — the Autry National Center, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, organizers reported in a media release.
A set of five interrelated exhibitions, L.A. Xicano explores the diverse artistic contributions of Mexican-descent artists since 1945. The exhibitions present hundreds of rarely seen paintings, sculptures, drawings, posters, murals, and photographs created by artists born from 1881 to 1983. Together, the five exhibitions provide the basis for a visual dialogue about Los Angeles and contemporary art.
This project uses Xicano, the alternate spelling of Chicano, with an X derived from the Spanish transcription of the Nahuatl sound “ch.” We do so not only as a gesture toward what poet Alurista describes as a distinctive Xicano artistic practice that first emerged in the 1940s but also to draw upon the multiple and conflicting meanings of the letter X—as a marker of place, identity, intention, and difference. In this way, X marks the necessary meeting point between the city of Los Angeles and its first, and now largest, population.
We encourage you to pursue this X at all four venues, so that you can chart the distinctive elements of each exhibition and the historical connections between them.
Art Along the Hyphen: The Mexican-American Generation
Autry National Center, October 14, 2011 – January 8, 2012
Art Along the Hyphen focuses on the two decades following 1945, presenting the work of six Mexican American artists who contributed to the emerging California iconography and its connections to the national imaginary. With an emphasis on painting and sculpture, the exhibition explores each artist’s dialogue with the various art movements of the twentieth century, which were refracted through cultural heritage, local observation, and social commentary. The exhibition also documents the fluid transition by some artists into the Chicano art movement of the 1970s.
Icons of the Invisible: Oscar Castillo
Fowler Museum at UCLA, Through February 26, 2012
Oscar Castillo began photographing the Chicano community in the 1960s. His work challenges stereotypical representations of East Los Angeles as violent or exotic, but it does so by maintaining a calm, almost matter-of-fact artistic gaze on everyday barrio life, the post–urban renewal landscape, and the cultural practices and political events that have redefined public space. Icons of the Invisible presents rarely exhibited photographs that trace the themes and stylistic approaches that have guided Castillo’s extensive body of work.
Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement
Fowler Museum at UCLA, October 16, 2011 – February 26, 2012
This exhibition brings together artifacts and artworks from nine Chicano art groups active between 1969 and 1980. The artists who worked in and among these groups began a collective reimagining of the urban landscape through ambitious public and graphic arts projects, educational programs, and other works. Their art was at once local, identity-based, and global in orientation; it explored the uncharted spaces between Mexican tradition, Chicano vernacular, and American modernism. Mapping Another L.A. also includes contemporary collaborations with artists who engage with the legacy of these groups.
Mural Remix: Sandra de la Loza
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 15, 2011 – January 22, 2012
Drawing upon archival and interview sources, de la Loza takes the role of a performative archivist, investigating the Chicano mural movement, L.A. urbanism, the light and space movement, and countercultural aesthetics. Using incidental or overlooked details from murals produced during the 1970s by Mexican American and Chicano artists, de la Loza presents a visual mash-up, creating new imagery that re-animates and re-figures the past.
Chican@s Collect: The Durón Family Collection
UCLA Chicano Research Center Library, Through December 9, 2011
Mary and Armando Durón have been collecting Chicana and Chicano — Chican@ — art by Los Angeles artists for almost thirty years. Their collection contains nearly five hundred works of art and an extensive number of catalogs and brochures, magazines, videos and DVDs, artist monographs, and related archival materials. Although Chican@s Collect represents both aspects of the Durón Family Collection, Mr. Durón has inverted usual curatorial practice by selecting objects from the library and then choosing works of art that have a connection to them.
Click here for the full media release
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