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Tracing a history: an exploration of contemporary Chicano art and artists

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Tracing a history: an exploration of contemporary Chicano art and artists

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Content TRACING A HISTORY: AN EXPLORATION OF CONTEMPORARY CHICANO ART AND ARTISTS by Jessica Jean Jardine A Professional Project Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS (JOURNALISM) August 2008 Copyright 2008 Jessica Jardine ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………………………..………iii Manuscript………………………………………………………………………...1 Bibliography………………………………………………………………….....22 iii ABSTRACT Almost thirty years have passed since the Chicano Movement in the American Southwest first began using art as a way to help change life for Chicanos and new generation of artists exist that are creating a variety of new art. These younger artists may be technically considered “Chicano artists” but there is ambivalence among many as to whether they are part of this singularly unifying label. By talking to younger artists, older artists and those within art institutions like the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art (LACMA), it becomes possible to see the way those in the arts community are attempting to understand contemporary Chicano art. There is also an important history ingrained in the art that came to fruition during the 1960s and 1970s Chicano Movement. By analyzing art from this period, one is able to more fully see the way contemporary artists may or may not relate to the themes of the era. One’s own art and creative expression is something so entirely personal that there may not be any singular answer to the question of whether contemporary Chicano/a artists align themselves with their cultural predecessors from 30 years earlier. Still, it is valuable to speak to those connected to the issue to see what understanding can be reached on such a complicated topic that intertwines race, labor struggles, politics, gender, socioeconomic disparities and so much more. 1 San Francisco-based artist, Isis Rodriguez considers herself a woman of many hats: a feisty feminist, boundary-pushing painter, fearless performance artist, an ardent lover of pop-culture, and a veteran of the exotic dancing world, to name a few. But when it comes to identifying herself as part of the contemporary Chicano art scene, she pauses. “That’s a name I have not given myself,” Rodriguez says while scooping up a bucket full of colorfully drenched paintbrushes that have been placed on the floor of her San Francisco art studio. She lovingly wraps her arms around the bucket – which is covered in punk rock and vending machine stickers – and stands in front of a few of her kaleidoscopically painted canvases and cartoon sketches. “Other people have given it to me but I don’t deny it because it is an honor. They see the struggle in my work and all of the things that Chicana stands for: being an activist, fighting for the rights of oppressed people. Like being called a feminist, it’s an honor when people call me a Chicana.” Rodriquez is a single example of a contemporary artist who celebrates numerous vestiges of traditional Chicano and Mexican art aesthetic in her work, but does not consider herself as specifically working under the larger umbrella of what those in the art community might label “Chicano/a art.” Instead, a variety of interests simultaneously pull her in multiple directions when she creates her art – all of which are dear to her heart and, in her eyes, make up her identity as an artist. She wears a well-worn pair of overalls and a grey t-shirt over her fit body – tying her equally well-worn painting smock across her stomach while excitedly describing the art pieces she’s created over the years that now sit stacked inside her studio. Several small bookshelves and an antique-looking kitchen table against a wall are painted intricately with her trademarked female cartoon characters and swirling, colored lettering, 2 including a school desk covered in fuzzy, red fake fur – she explains it was part of a collaborative project with a friend. Mexican kitchenware, including oilcloth placemats and ceramic plates sit near the sink area, covered with forgotten drops of colored paint and pencil shavings. A quick glance at Rodriguez’s catalogue of work from the last 22 years, as well as the canvases that line the walls of her studio, shows irreverent themes of feminism, loving nods to popular cartoons of the 1970s, and a consistent connection to the type of art often associated with some aspects of Chicano culture. This includes traditional tattoo, folk, mural, and “lowrider” art – the type of work that might be spray painted on the hoods of souped-up, classic cars from the 1950s and ‘60s. Since graduating with a bachelor’s degree in painting in the late 1980s, Rodriguez has held over 30 exhibitions in galleries across the county, put on dozens of original stage performances and even been commissioned to create public murals and large-scale mosaics for her adopted hometown, San Francisco. Perusing the titles of her exhibitions and performances tell a great deal about what interests Rodriguez as an artist: “Brave New Girl,” “Upraise of the Urban Goddess,” “Ladies of Lowbrow,” “Amigo/Racism,” and “My Life as a Comic Stripper,” are just a few. These pieces show fluidly drawn cartoon figures that are oftentimes brown-skinned Latinas like herself, sometimes nude and oftentimes fiercely looking straight ahead. They seem to almost challenge the viewer or coyly grin, as if they are privy to some information that the viewer is not. Their va-va-voom figures look like they could belong tattooed on a sailor’s arm while their faces look like the popular tween Bratz dolls. 3 More than anything else, she cites the goofy, cartoon culture of her adolescence as being the most influential early factor in her art. Hannah-Barbera cartoons like “The Flinstones,” and “The Jetsons,” as well as MAD Magazine classics like “Spy vs. Spy” lured her to doodle and sketch for hours on end in her bedroom as a teenager. “I would just copy pictures of Yogi Bear over and over until I got everything in proportion,” Rodriguez says. “They’re very simple cartoons but it was really my first lessons in classical art. You have to consider the proportions of the character in order for it to come out. It ended up developing me as an artist so that I pay attention to things very carefully – looking at people’s faces and noticing whether it’s round, heart-shaped and so on.” Rodriguez’ own face is heart-shaped and welcoming while her eyes smile from behind red, cat-eye glasses. The forty-two year old’s hair sits in a messy up-do piled atop her head with a traditional, floral comb stuck in the top so that she looks like a modern- day Frida Kahlo. She says most of her days are spent inside her studio in the city’s Excelsior district, a neighborhood she says she’s come to love more and more in since relocating from the Mid West in 1990. In fact, it was this move from her family’s home in rural Kansas, which proved to be tricky for Rodriguez as she aimed to connect with those in California she felt shared her cultural heritage. Though her father is Mexican and her mother Puerto Rican, she says that growing up in the white, agricultural plains of the Midwest meant she was pushed to assimilate rather than connect with her Latino roots. “I wasn’t allowed to speak Spanish and didn’t see that necessarily as a bad thing until I moved to California,” Rodriguez says. “Where I grew up, everybody spoke 4 English and my parents didn’t tell me it was a denial of our culture. In fact, my dad would remind me that it’s a Spaniard’s language –European – and has nothing to do with being Mexican or Puerto Rican. It’s an imperial language just like English.” When she received her undergraduate degree in painting from the University of Kansas and moved out to the cultural “melting pot,” of the Bay Area, Rodriguez says she was stunned by the reaction she received. “I was so excited. I knew this was the home of Latino rights and Chicanos and everything. I thought, ‘Yay! I’m finally going to meet the real deal!’” she recalled. Instead, she found a great deal of splintering and fragmentation among the Latinos she met in California. Divisions based on identifying racial terms like “Chicano” versus “Hispanic,” seemed to rage on and on in Rodriguez’s eyes. “In the Latino community, everybody’s from a different place: Guatemala, Mexico and so on,” she says. “You learn one of the hardest parts of real diversity is accepting the differences. It just made me realize how much I want all Latinos, Chicanos – whatever! – to come together.” Even as a young artist, just starting out in the early 1990s, Rodriguez began filtering these feelings through her work as an artist. Her cartoonish characters and sexy female centerpieces became imbued with symbols of the 1960s-70s period of the Chicano Movement as well as pop culture. In her 2008 collection, The Masked Women Series, she used charcoal and chalk to sketch realistic images of alluring, toned women wearing little more than underwear and the type of lace-up, platform boots one might see on a stripper. Some wear superhero-style capes draped over their shoulders and another sits wearing a military jacket with medals hanging off the breast pocket. All of them have black, knitted 5 ski masks pulled over their faces, reminiscent of those worn by the Emiliano Zapato’s Mexican peasant fighters during the Mexican Revolution of the early 20 th Century. “I see the ski mask as a part of the Zapatista revolution; the struggle for the indigenous people who were fighting to have their own land, grow their own crops and preserve themselves from becoming extinct,” she says. Rodriguez’s affinity for symbols of female strength also fuses with familiar vestiges of Latino culture, particularly as they are represented in popular culture. Her menacing “chola girls,” as she terms them, have scars on their cheeks and Puerto Rican flag bandanas on their heads. Her nude, female cartoons with their winking eyes, called the “Little Miss Attitude Series,” are found alongside images of the popular Mexican religious icon, Lady of Guadalupe – sometimes merging together into one hybrid figure. “[Being Chicana] is always in my mind,” Rodriguez says. “But, for me, I just have so much that I want to talk about with my art. It’s not always a focal point for me and I just draw upon it when it strikes me and feels right.” Before being able to discuss the questions of identity politics involved in being a contemporary Chicano/a artist, like Rodriguez, it becomes necessary to understand just what the term implies. Much like Cubism or Dadaism or Native American art, Chicano/a art has its own unique set of aesthetics, meanings and guiding forces that deserve to be explored and understood. A Look Back There is a rich, complex history to what is commonly referred to as “Chicano art” that dates back as far as the Mexican American War that began in 1846. One of the more 6 recent strains connecting more specifically to the American Southwest is the art that flourished during the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s – a significant period that showed Chicanos fighting for civil rights as well as a place in the American public consciousness. Although the term “Chicano,” is oftentimes incorrectly interchanged with “Latino” or “Hispanic,” it actually specifically defines those who have roots in Mexico. In the mid-1960s, the Chicano Civil Rights Movement gathered steam and aimed to obtain social justice for Mexican-Americans, particularly in terms of labor, education and housing. A myriad of other pressing issues were also being tackled that included a need for welfare, health care, law enforcement and many other government services. Also, there were those who protested the Vietnam War, in which a disproportionate number of Chicanos were being killed. Leaders like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta mobilized thousands of activists across the American Southwest in support of a farm workers’ union. Chavez would go on to co-found the National Farm Workers Association, which eventually became the United Farm Workers, a vital labor union. Through boycotts and the principles of non-violence championed by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., the union fought a drawn- out battle to obtain unemployment insurance for field workers. His efforts and those of his fellow activists would eventually lead to improved wages and safety regulations – solidifying him as a civil rights hero among many. Because the Mexican-American community was considered so peripheral at the time and, thus, covered so sparsely by the mainstream media, art and other forms of popular expression became necessary tools to connect and unite the Chicano population. Painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking all blossomed in the Chicano community 7 alongside murals, a hallmark of Mexican art that became an integral part of relaying identity, pride and cultural expression to one another. “The arts were specific to that movement [because] this is a community that, at the time, was largely locked out of mass communication,” said Chon A. Noriega, a UCLA Chicano Studies Professor and Associate Director of the school’s Chicano Studies Research Center, in an interview. “This was before people had cellphones and email so it wasn’t easy to communicate a message to an entire community.” As noted earlier, he explains that, “a mural may not communicate an immediate message, given the fact it’s not that easy to put a new one up every week, but it’s a message about that social space – that you have some permanence within it. The fliers, the posters, the student newspapers – with art these became way of communicating something as specific as ‘the next march is 6 p.m., let’s meet here,’ but being able to do it in ways that would aesthetically grab people.” Artist, teacher and community outreach organizer, Judy Baca, is one of the most notable figures in Los Angeles Chicano mural art history. She is currently a professor at UCLA’s Chicano Studies Department as well as the co-founder of the LA-based community arts organization, Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). In an 2004 essay, she articulates much of the impact murals had locally on the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, “Apart from its initial purpose of creating a capacity for the imagery of the people to occupy public space, Los Angeles murals spoke to the cultural demands of a previously under-represented peoples. Some works became cultural-affirmation images, asserting only that we exist as distinct cultures; others addressed the hard task of articulating and advocating for resolution of issues affecting the places where our people lived and worked.” 8 She goes on to note that in the planning and painting of the murals she and other artists “consciously avoided Western European aesthetics, instead privileging Chicano culture, religious iconography, Mexican calendars, tattoos, street writing, whatever could better and more accurately portray our direct life-experience. In this way, we were able to create unique and specific art form that spoke to our own lived experience in the barrios and inner cities of Los Angeles.” Max Benavidez, a writer, art historian and lecturer at UCLA writes in the 2002 book Chicano Visions that during this period the Chicano artistic style began to truly foment. “…Chicano art’s aesthetics antecedents – those forces and visionaries that set down the basic parameters of the imagery, style, and content that influences artists, particularly those from Los Angeles. The most influential were Los Tres Grandes (the three great ones) of Mexican muralism: Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco; the hyper-selfconscious portraitist Frida Kahlo; the assertively nonconformist pachuco street style of the early 1940s; and the visual bravura of LA’s ubiquitous Mexican-American gang graffiti. Lastly, there is the ‘city of quartz’ itself, the great churning, freeway-sliced megalopolis of Los Angeles, a city founded in 1781 by a multiracial band of Mexican settlers, and often viewed as the prototypical twenty-first century model of urban sprawl and estrangement. Stir it all up and we have true art noir, Chicano style.” Benavidez also writes that the mural appearing all over Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s functioned as a vital information channel for the community. “[They] were forms of social and political literacy. The murals were the texts, the artists were the teachers or the instructors, and the members of the community were the students, readers learning about a movement otherwise ignored in the mass media of the day.” 9 He goes on to explain that the emerging aesthetic often included the following traits: “A critique of the status quo; Visual demarcations between conventionally accepted cultural modes and Chicano values; cultural integrity and self-affirmation’ the use of montage – the bringing together of dissimilar elements into a new whole – as an essential technique.” Many artists that would eventually become well-known in the Chicano Movement started out as muralists, including Carlos Almaraz, Glugio “Gronk” Nicarando, John Valdez, Margaret Garcia and Willie Herron. Two specific schools of art emerged in the 1970s, as well: The first was Los Four, which included Almarez, Gilbert “Magu” Ljan, Roberto “Beto” de la Rocha, and Frank Romero as original members. The second significant art group was Asco (Spanish for “nausea”), which included Gronk, Herron, Patssi Valdez and Harry Gamboa, Jr. as original members. Along with numerous murals and an increasingly defined, oftentimes colorful painting style, these artists also integrated public performance and graffiti art as a form of Chicano Expression. One notable instance is when Asco members broke into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in the early 1970s and spray painted their names on the outside of the main building. This was meant as a stark, attention-grabbing protest to call attention to the fact that LACMA had failed to exhibit Chicano art up to this point. Times have changed since Asco artists boldly tagged their names on the LACMA building. In fact, in 1974, the museum hosted Los Four: Almaraz, de la Rocha, Lujan, Romero and became the first large museum to recognize the contribution of Chicano Art in America. Since then, Chicano art has taken an increasingly prominent role in galleries and notable artistic institutions. In 2004, LACMA announced a five-year partnership with 10 the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center known as the Latino Arts Initiative, aiming to “capitalize on the strengths of both institutions to create a greater understanding of Chicano and Latino arts and cultures for the wider public,” as the press release noted. Specifically, the initiative set out to curate exhibitions, publications, research projects, collections and community relations. This, of course, is just one example of a major institution in one city setting out to recognize Chicano art more fully in the arts community. It also raises the larger question of whether efforts like LACMA’s are able to address those contemporary artists who, while being defined as Chicano/as, are unlike the Asco artists in seeking the same cultural recognition. Artists Address Their Heritage and Art Large-scale gallery and museum exhibitions can exist as tools to enable more widespread awareness among art audiences, though they can also frustrate and alienate those artists attempting to work outside of singular labels. This is true in the contemporary Chicano art world and, specifically, in the case of an upcoming exhibition at LACMA which focuses on contemporary artists after the Chicano Movement. Even when those behind taste-defining public showcases aim to keep the boundaries and definitions of the presented work fluid and purposefully vague, it can become difficult to separate it from the identity politics it inherently participates in from title alone. Though this view does not negate the importance or necessity of such exhibitions, it becomes interesting to talk to those working on the curatorial end of such institutions, artists participating as artists in the show and those artists who are not involved to see the different ways they relate to the categorizing of one’s art. 11 From April 6 th to September 1 st , 2008 LACMA presents Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement, co-curated by Professor Noriega and two LACMA curators, Rita Gonzalez and Howard Fox. In it, over 130 pieces of art created by 31 artists will showcase what the museum has cautiously deemed “more experimental tendencies within the Chicano art movement – ones oriented less toward painting and declarative polemical assertion than toward conceptual art, performance, film, photo-and media- based art, and ‘stealthy’ artistic interventions in urban space.” In this way, it seems the museum is decidedly working to separate itself from the assertion that it’s globbing together artists purely because they are Chicano/a and, instead, identifying them as “experimental” artists. Yet, Noriega said in an interview that he and his fellow curators made a conscious decision to question the issue of “identity politics” that younger Chicano artists might grapple with, while simultaneously focusing on harnessing the unexpected. “What we’re hoping for is that when people come to the show and see the work, it’s going to surprise them so that they say, ‘That’s not what I would’ve thought of then I think of Chicano art.’ It should be a show that captures the imagination of younger people; that really has a sensibility of how people who grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s –who weren’t even alive in the ‘70s in many cases – engage the world. What’s available for them to make a statement? Do they want to make a statement or do something else?” Though Noriega and his fellow curators may have left the questions open ended for audiences to interpret, that doesn’t mean those creating the art are void of opinions about their inclusion into an exhibition for Chicano/a artists. 12 35-year old performance/installation/multimedia artist, Mario Ybarra Jr, is an LA native who has shown his art in exhibitions nationwide and internationally, including the London’s Tate Modern and, most recently, the 2008 Whitney Biennial in New York City. He will be participating in the Phantom Sightings exhibition and stands as an example of a prominent artist who does not stand willingly under a single artistic niche based on ethnic heritage. Instead, he sees the label as part of the past. “‘Chicano art’ the term I feel has definitive generational ties to a school of thought that was tied to a specific movement in history,” Ybarra said in an interview. “So, I am not a Chicano artist like I am not a New York school abstract expressionist or a cubist artist or pop artist and so on. On the other hand, by default and cultural recognition based on ethnicity, I am Mexican-American and Chicano.” Ybarra echoed a similar sentiment in a 2006 LA Times article where he said, “I make contemporary art through a Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles. It’s not my goal to learn Nahuatl but to speak Cantonese.” Even given that, he went on to say that, “I do address the concerns of such communities in my work: unfair incrimination and imprisonment of the Mexican- American community in California; the police state in Los Angeles and so on.” When asked if Ybarra Jr. felt that a Chicano artist community exists in LA he noted that “there is a loose understanding and affinity for each other but we also understand being Chicano or Mexican American is not solely a bonding factor. People have different agendas and have to negotiate between several types of communities that they all simultaneously belong to.” His 2006 work Brown and Proud, “melds Diego Rivera’s civic frescoes with inner-city graffiti art, juxtaposing the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata with Star 13 Wars characters Chewbacca in large-scale mural emblazoned with slogans (“POR VIDA”/ “FOR LIFE”), frenetic tags, and the requisite badass, bikini clad model,” as described by the Whitney. Ybarra also talked about graffiti culture as a significant influence on his own artistic beginnings, “I grew up here in LA – my mom and dad did, too – and the earliest graffiti I saw was on the concrete in front of my grandma’s house in San Pedro. My uncles would all write their name in ‘70s gangster block letters on their books, too,” he said. “I started a local tagging crew in high school and then went on to write graf for a crew for a while before I stopped and went to art school. Graf was my pre-art school art school, but graf had too many rules for me and too many street politics involved in LA around.” Though Ybarra may define Chicano art as being a moment history that has passed, other artists are more willing to align their work as part of a larger, personal historical trajectory. Photographer Christina Fernandez, also a participant in Phantom Sightings, uses her work to showcase everything from graffiti-riddled storefronts to serene nature scenes to eerily neon-lit laundromats, or lavanderias that are located throughout East LA. She sees the question of identification under the “Chicano artist” banner as simple and overwrought by many of her contemporaries. “Being a Chicana artist has to do with identifying myself as a Chicana and the fact that I’m an artist,” she said in an interview. “It mystifies me that there’s such a resistance to calling yourself a Chicano/Chicana artist. My definitions are kind of clear in my head.” Regarding those who adamantly refuse to be labeled “Chicano/a artists,” Fernandez says, “I think it’s kind of weird and on the silly side – just that people are 14 taking themselves way too seriously. It isn’t brain surgery; it’s art. I mean, it’s necessity of life for us but it seems to be a little overblown. I really just don’t get it.” Born and raised in Los Angeles, Fernandez noted that her family “has decades of history,” in the city, particularly a history of activism. After her graduate studies as a painter, sculptor and performance artist at UCLA in the late 1980s, Fernandez chose photography as a primary mode of expression. In the years since, she’s used the medium to explore issues of life in urban environments, domestic labor and even the visceral bleakness of local garment factories. When asked what compels her subject-wise, she excitedly explained that it can be everything from the “drippy graffiti I totally fell in love with” to the “aesthetically interesting stainless steel movement of machines inside laundromats, where private activities are also done in public.” She shot her newest photo series almost entirely in El Sereno (located in Northeast LA), and sees the experience as a clear-cut example that her cultural heritage directly influenced her work. “It’s photographs of my neighborhood from a very distinct point of view,” Fernandez said. “It’s a Mexican-American, working class neighborhood. To say that somehow isn’t related to my identity and that the geography of where I’m photographing has nothing to do with Chicanoism – I mean, the people in this neighborhood may not call themselves Chicanos but that’s what they are. And they’re being shot by a Chicana.” Outside of photography like Fernandez’s, there are numerous strains of art that could be perceived as also reflecting a Chicano artistic heritage. Mexican-born graffiti artist and muralist Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez is an example of someone who has successfully translated his affinity for graffiti art into more traditional style murals and popular art, specifically in Los Angeles. Though he feels a connection with the 15 longstanding Mexican tradition of mural art in his own work, he describes an interesting generational tension he feels has grown between young artists like himself and the muralists who align more with the art of the Chicano Movement. “To be honest with you, there is always a struggle with Chicano artists and Chicano graffiti artists and writers,” he said. “It has to do a lot with [the fact that] so many of the Chicano murals are being destroyed by graffiti writers who know that if they paint a wall illegally, it will get painted over quickly by the city.” He went on to explain that over the years, graffiti artists have learned that the city is not allowed to paint over public murals and has to commission the artist to restore the mural – a long process of paperwork and waiting for the funds to come through. This means that painting one’s graffiti over a mural ensures it will stay put for an extended period of time. “It’s a vicious cycle because in less than a week, the murals will look just as bad after being restored once they’re written on again. I don’t agree with destroying murals for the purpose of fame. It’s cheap fame to me. I know plenty of writers that put in work and get recognition without destroying someone else’s art,” said Quiñonez Before settling in Los Angeles, the 32 year-old grew up in East Dallas, Texas. While still in high school he became interested in what he describes as the “more advanced graffiti” painted on freight trains criss-crossing the Lone Star state. In an interview, he noted that seeing graffiti was his introduction to the arts overall. “Honestly, growing up in the hood you don’t get to go to museums.” Like most beginning graffiti artists, he and his friends began attempting their own graffiti pieces around town to teach themselves the art. “For people from my generation there was very little information available online or in books or magazines,” he said. “We 16 didn’t know any professional artists or graffiti writers willing to teach you anything so you learned by mistakes and painting some horrible pieces.” Eventually Quiñonez’s love of the illegal art form caught up with him and landed him on probation – just as he was leaving for the Museum School of Fine Art in Boston on a scholarship. “It was crazy for me to see how graffiti could get me in trouble and also a scholarship,” he said. Quiñonez’s art has evolved into many variations of his mainstay, graffiti art. He produces painted fine art pieces for gallery exhibitions, cartoon art, packaging, murals, logos and even a series of vinyl toys. His work infuses a stylish, hip-hop inspired feel to images of jutting telephone poles, boomboxes (a.k.a. ghetto blasters), turntables and microphones that are oftentimes fused with depictions of Frida Kahlo, traditional Aztec gods, slain rappers, and Dia de los Muertos skulls. He has even created graffiti-inspired designs for international corporations like Nike, Adidas and Disney in their attempts to cultivate a more urban appeal. “[They] try to take from my culture and it has its ups and downs. Seeing graffiti used to pedal their products is not always easy to digest,” he said. The seemingly endless availability of streets, buildings and public spaces will likely remain as a breeding ground for graffiti and mural art across the state and country. As Viktor Marka pointed out, graffiti art will also continue to flourish due to “it’s nature of being free. Corporations get to cover the streets with advertisements whether we want them or not because they pay money. Graffiti writers and street artists do the same thing without paying or pushing a product.” LA-based graffiti artists like Chaz Bojorquez from the 1970s and today’s Man One continue to inspire legions of aspiring urban artists who will pick up spray paint cans and paintbrushes and step outside to find an available concrete canvas to share their message. 17 Though tension may exist between certain factions of outdoor artists, as Marka27 suggested, divisions among the many Chicano artists have no clear-cut sides. Essentially, it becomes a proprietary question for some artists: whether they are willing to identify and label their work as belonging to any specific school, history or ethnicity – or not. Artists like Fernandez, Ybarra and Marka27 make up just a smattering of plot points on the wide scope of artists confronting such cultural identity politics. For some, sewing a connective thread to the art of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s-70s is simple, creating little or no feeling of compromise for the artist. Yet, for others, it seems to strip them of the unique identity they’ve worked to create – effectively using ethnicity to lump their work alongside that of artists who might not share their aesthetic or artistic principles. While galleries like LACMA may be delicately attempting to create some sort of divisional fence around these artists, it is one based most singularly on cultural heritage and not unique visions or themes. The Art and the Artist: Unwilling/Unable to Stand Under a Single Label Back in San Francisco’s vibrant Mission District, artist Isis Rodriguez is washing off her paint covered hands after a long day of work. The colors dance and swirl together under the faucet while her friendly voice practically bubbles and sings in describing an upcoming exhibition in Argentina she’s participating in. “It’s going to be beautiful,” she says, her crow’s feet crinkling up in a smile that overtakes her entire face. Subjected Culture: Interruptions and Resistance on Femaleness at the MACRO Museo de Arte Contemporaneo will first show in before traveling to Buenos Aires, where live musical performances and political speeches will take culminate the almost three month showing. 18 “I don’t know if they can pay to fly me out just yet, but I’m so beyond excited to be sharing a gallery space with people from so many places, talking about such a fantastically important issue in my world.” In fact, her fellow artists will hail from Argentina, France, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Pakistan and Uganda. For Rodriguez, her life as a woman is what defines her creativity and expression most singularly, first and foremost. In her artist statement she notes, “Women are a special interest to me because they are stereotypes of sexual power. Through observation, I’ve noticed that their sexual power is always in a state of conflict. I feel compelled to identify the conflict and to resolve this conflict – to make things better. This is how I make art.” Her visually striking Masked Woman Series is a perfect example of this drive – as well as her own cultural heritage – as manifested in art. On the shoulders of the colorful, muscular woman she has drawn are much smaller, black and white cartoon women who are nude. She explains this image of a cartoon interacting with the realistic figure as “nepantla,” a term she has learned symbolizes a psychological place in the indigenous consciousness. “’Nepantla’ is an Aztec word meaning ‘torn between two ways’ used to describe the cultural polarization that took place during the colonization of Mexico,” she explains, sitting down to look for a book on this topic among several unkempt stacks that look ready to tumble off a shelf. Though she cannot find the one she’s looking for, she gives up and explains, “The Aztecs invented this word during the Spaniard rule to describe their conflict in being forced to become ‘modernize’ The cartoon’s interaction with the masked woman is used to create a ‘nepantla” – to capture the differences between the 19 cartoon and her realistic cohort. Both rely on proportion, however, one is perfected to represent real life while the other is distorted to represent imagination.” Writing about the series later, she explains that the images are a symbol for her own “personal struggle to become a woman in a modern environment dominated by popular media stereotypes, enduring and overcoming my own colonization of a pop art culture.” Rodriguez can be seen as a fitting example of a contemporary Chicano artist in the way that she comfortably wears so many hats at once; tackles so many complicated, important themes while celebrating art that is highbrow, camp and everything in between. She is an artist expressing herself in many media – from paint to pencil to charcoal to iron to wood furniture and more. Much like Marka27 or Christina Fernandez or Mario Ybarra Jr., she is by all accounts a contemporary Chicano/a artist but is simultaneously working in so many other realms that concern, interest and fascinate her – with feminism above all else in her case. Graffiti art and photographs of lavanderias and modern murals are all artistic expressions that harkens back to the grand and decidedly rich history of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists like Judy Baca, Los Four, Gronk and Carlos Almarez are but a sprinkling of the dozens of artists who helped shape the Chicano artistic vision of that period – which was, in itself, deeply connected to facets of traditional Mexican art. Their work was able to coincide and coalesce with the Chicano Movement occurring at the time and inform the communities in Los Angeles and across the American Southwest to the injustices being afflicted upon the population – and spark dramatic change. 20 In recent years, major art institutions like LACMA have poured a great deal of time, energy and resources into becoming more recognized centers for contemporary Chicano art while also, as Professor Noriega attested to, attempting not to lump these artists together too generally under one umbrella. As he sees it, they are recognizing that there are numerous artists who may technically be designated as Chicano or Chicana but do not subscribe to the artistic and/or historical precedent being a “Chicano artist,” can imply. Though it may be a trapping of a large scale, themed show like Phantom Sightings, the efforts made by curators to showcase the esoteric fringe and avante garde contemporary artists – who just so happen to also be Chicano/as – seem to actually bring the larger questions of ethnic and cultural identification as an artist to the forefront of the discussion. In a way, it seems that attempting to downplay the Chicanoism of such exhibitions only serves to highlight the inherent difficulty in categorizing or grouping any wide swath of artists. For an artist like Rodriguez who has always striven to blur, blend and redefine the boundaries between accepted artistic niches, recognition for her art from an institution like LACMA is the least of her concerns. “I’m not interested in making art that the masses are going to give their stamp of approval on,” she says while hanging her art worn painting smock up on a coat hook. She readjusts the polished, floral clip in her hair before staring directly ahead, making firm eye contact and saying, “I grew up with the type of art that went against bourgeois culture – weird comic books and low brow art and protest art and prison tattoos – so I’m really just looking to create symbols and images that establish a woman’s voice like my own, without any apologies.” 21 BIBLIOGRAPHY Baca, Judy. “The Art of the Mural” essay for PBS American Family: Journey of Dreams series (2004) <www.pbs.org/americanfamily/mural.html> Benavidez, Max. Gronk (A Ver) (2007) Chicano Studies Research Center Press, Los Angeles. Benavidez, Max. “Mural LA: The Rise and Fall of a Popular Art.” in Art Issues Journal, 1995. Cardalliaguet Gomez-Malaga, Maria “The Mexican and Chicano Mural Movement”; Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, <http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/2006/2/06.02.01.x.html> Criswold del Castillo, Richard; McKenna, Teresa and Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985 (1991) University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Dunitz, Robin J. Street Gallery: Guide to 1000 Los Angeles Murals (1993) RJD Enterprises, Los Angeles. Fernandez, Christina. Personal Interview. March 2008 Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. Chicano Art Inside/outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (1998) University of Texas Press, Austin. 22 Gurza, Agustin. “Picture Brightens for Self Help Graphics.” Los Angeles Times, Calendar section. 15 March, 2008. E.1 Isenberg, Barbara. State of the Arts (2000) William Morrow, New York. Hart, Hugh. “Art; Reflecting the Street; Even as His Work Takes Flight, Mario Ybarra Jr. Keeps His Feet Planted in the Neighborhood He Knows.” Los Angeles Times. 3 September 2006. E.28 Kim, Sojin. Chicano Graffiti and Mural: the Neighborhood Art of Peter Quezada (2005) University of Press of Mississippi, Hong Kong. LACMA website, Exhibitions section <http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibitPhantom.aspx> Latorre, Guisela and Sandoval, Chela. “Chicana/o Artivism: Judy Baca’s Digital Work with Youth of Color.” Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA; the MIT Press, 2008. 81-108 Leopold, Shelley. “The Expressionist: Mario Ybarra Jr..” LA Weekly. 19 April, 2006. Marin, Cheech; Benavidez, Max; Cortez, Constance; Romo, Tere, Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge (2002) Bulfinch Press. Boston, New York, London. More, Pat. Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle (1993) University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Noriega, Chon A.. Just Another Poster? Chicano Graphic Arts in California, University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara. (2001) University of Washington Press, Seattle and London. Noriega, Professor Chon A.. Personal Interview. February 2008 Perez, Laura E. Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (2007) Duke University Press, Durham. Quiñonez, Victor “Marka 27.” Personal Interview. January 2008 Raymond, Anthea. “The Parties, the Punks and the Past.” Los Angeles Downtown News, website. 17 December, 2007. http://www.downtownnews.com/articles/2007/12/17/news/news01.txt Rodriguez, Isis. Personal Interview. January 2008 23 Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) website, The Great Wall Resource Portal <http://www.sparcmurals.org/sparcone/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id= 20&Itemid=52> The Thomas Rivera Institute, Latinos and Information Technology: The Promise and the Challenge. The IBM Hispanic Digital Divide Task Force (2002) Claremont, CA U.S. Census Bureau website, “State & County QuickFacts.” Los Angeles, CA <http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06037.html> Vallen, Mark. Art For Change website. Posting 5 August, 2006. “L.A.’s Siqueiros Mural to Live Again.” <http://www.art-for-a-change.com/blog/2006/08/las-siqueiros-mural-to-live-again> Whitney Biennial website, Artists section, <http://www.whitney.org/www/2008biennial/www/?section=artists&page=artist_ybarra> Ybarra Jr., Mario. Personal Interview. February 2008

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Almost thirty years have passed since the Chicano Movement in the American Southwest first began using art as a way to help change life for Chicanos and new generation of artists exist that are creating a variety of new art. These younger artists may be technically considered "Chicano artists" but there is ambivalence among many as to whether they are part of this singularly unifying label.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Jardine, Jessica Jean (author)

Core Title Tracing a history: an exploration of contemporary Chicano art and artists

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Journalism (Print Journalism)

Publication Date 08/13/2008

Defense Date 07/01/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art,Chicano,LACMA,Latino,OAI-PMH Harvest

Place Name Los Angeles (counties), museum buildings: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (geographic subject)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kun, Joshua (committee chair), Anawalt, Sasha M. (committee member), Gutierrez, Felix Frank (committee member)

Creator Email jardine@usc.edu,jessica.jean.jardine@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1577

Unique identifier UC1298688

Identifier etd-Jardine-1871 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-105510 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1577 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Jardine-1871.pdf

Dmrecord 105510

Document Type Thesis

Rights Jardine, Jessica Jean

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu