What is Chicano art? The question gets to one of the defining tensions in the modern Mexican American experience -- to live with the static struggle of dual cultural identities in the context of a wildly flattening, globalizing, media saturated world. The exhibit "Phantom Sightings," which opens at LACMA on Monday, may offer some new and challenging answers. It is a survey of art produced mostly by Mexican Americans in a variety of media after the peak of the Chicano Movement, generally seen as the late 1960s through the early 1970s, to today.
The show may be the most anticipated art exhibit in Los Angeles museums this year. And the impact may be lasting. "Phantom Sightings" is scheduled to travel to other U.S. cities as well as here to Mexico City, where modern "Chicanos" remain mostly a foreign entity to the local cultural intelligentsia. Yet there is clearly more to the show than the rehashing of unresolved identity politics. There is a very apparent thematic undercurrent being communicated, dealing with temporality, the refraction caused by multiple media perspectives, a sort of active marginalization.
Two media previews for "Phantom Sightings" currently in circulation: Agustin Gurza in the L.A. Times and Adolfo Guzman-Lopez at KPCC. Also, early blog buzz from Pachucoville, Marshall Astor, and Ken Burns Hates Mexicans.
In his piece, Gurza writes:
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.
"Phantom Sightings" is curated by Rita Gonzalez, Howard Fox, and Chon Noriega. Here again is my LA Weekly piece "The Art Outlaws of East L.A.," which previewed the show last June and discusses the history and legacy of Asco, the collective now considered the foundational spark for "post-Chicano Movement" art.
Other online sources and related browsing: Ruben Ortiz-Torres, Harry Gamboa Jr., Mario Ybarra Jr., Sandra de la Loza, Sickly Season.
There are many posts in Intersections that are related to the art, artists, and themes dealt with in "Phantom Sightings." Here is a sampling: On Asco, on Shizu Saldamando, on the Pocho Research Society, on LACMA's locura, on L.A. as the new brown capital, on binationality 1, on binationality 2, on the romance of cholos, on the murals of Estrada Courts, on Vincent Valdez, on the Night Stalker, on historic L.A. gang glyphs, on freestyle, on art from Tijuana, and on Arte No Es Vida, a show recently mounted at the Museo del Barrio in New York City.
* Image above, a drawing from a series by Tijuana-born Julio Cesar Morales that depict actual immigrant smuggling methods. That's a modified automobile dashboard.