At a time when their community had been caricatured and stereotyped while their voices were shut out of the mainstream narrative, Los Angeles-based Chicano artists throughout the 1970s and 1980s strove to scrutinize aspects of popular culture and advanced alternative narratives concerning race, gender, sexuality and citizenship.
The works of artists like Carlos Almaraz, Patssi Valdez, Teddy Sandoval, Dr. Judith F. Baca and other first-generation Americans, who would come of age during the expanding media culture of the 1960s, helped uplift the city’s Chicano community and inspired a wave of social movements. These works will be showcased in La Plaza de Cultura y Artes and AltaMed’s exhibition, “LA Memo: Chicana/o Art from 1972-1989,” which runs from Friday, March 18, to Sunday, Aug. 14.
AltaMed is the home to a portio of the largest collections of Chicano art in the world.
Curated by LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes’ Karen Crews Hendon and Rafael Barrientos Martínez, curatorial assistant at AltaMed, “LA Memo” brings together a diverse collection of works often considered cornerstones of Chicano art history. They explore how these artists adapted new modes of image making and self-expression to shape a new genre of art that shared their stories through painting, film, television, magazines, newspapers, theater and music.
“For this show, I approached this theme with the premise of trying to expand the dialogue of how we talk about Chicana and Chicano art and really looking at a period that’s been underserved by a lot of scholarship being the 1970s and ’80s,” Martínez explained.
By showcasing more than 50 pieces of art from over 30 artists, the “LA Memo” exhibition offers a robust sample of the AltaMed’s collection of Chicano artworks to trace the journey of the Chicano art movement as a whole while also celebrating each artist’s individuality within it.
“When you bring a lot of these personalities and different artists together and their visual representations into the space, there’s a very high energy going on and there’s a lot of different unspoken conversations that are happening from work to work,” Hendon said.
“When you walk through the space, you’re going to see relationships. You’re going to see similar references, yet each artist is so unique in how they not only represent themselves but what they’re representing in their own community, their own neighborhoods, and more specifically their own experiences.”
During the 1950s and 1960s, member Chicanos who were growing up at that time did not see themselves adequately represented in the image culture around them. Whether it was in newspapers or on television, they saw caricatures and stereotypes of themselves within the media. According to Martínez, much of the Chicano artwork during that time filled the gaps in how the world portrayed them.
“These artists are not only experimenting with representing themselves but representing their heritage, representing the spaces that they live in and their history,” Martínez explained. “They’re trying to represent a shared connectivity via a shared ancestry.”
This concept of using heritage to unify is exemplified in the artistic depictions of Aztlan, the mythic motherland of the Chicano people. In this vein, the Chicano art movement began to explore and convey the history of Southern California not only as Mexican and Indigenous lands.
Many contemporary artists who were mentored by the visionaries featured in the “LA Memo” exhibit still experiment with this concept of identity and place. They analyze their place in the fabric of Los Angeles and how they’ve evolved into the city but also how the city has evolved around them.
“I’m very grateful to these artists, and I’m very grateful to the activists that have been…
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