from the LA Times
Chicano art, beyond rebellion
© Jason Villegas, LACMA
OFF THE WALL: Artist Jason Villegas’ “Celestial Situations,” a video projection with wall drawing, is part of the new LACMA exhibit titled “Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement.”
‘Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement’ provides a rare showcase at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
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?”
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.