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PREFACE & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

During the early 80s, I traveled throughout California and the Southwest, looking at works of artists from that region which I planned to exhibit in New York.  After weeks of observing the vast, majestic landscape, I decided also to experience the shopping malls, the boutiques and the business offices.  I ate and slept in urban and suburban motels, hotels, apartments and houses.  It was there that I became aware of the existence of a very strong Mexican-American subculture that seeped into mainstream life as ornamentation (handcrafts, pottery, textiles, mission architecture: images of cowboys and Indians, buffalo skulls, religious icons) or food.  Motels usually had a double menu — one American, the other Mexican — and boasted features such as an "old Spanish atmosphere combining the refinement and grace of years gone by with the most contemporary amenities, hot tubs and satellite color T.V."

But where were the creators of this culture?

I started asking the artists I visited — after all, we all know each other.  Are there many Hispanics living in Phoenix?  "I don't think so...I don't know.  I haven't seen them." (In 1980, 14.8% of Phoenix's population was Hispanic.) In Dallas: Are there Hispanics living here?  "Well, you know we do everything and go everywhere in a car.  It's hard to know if they're living here." (Dallas' population was 12.3% Hispanic in 1980.) In Austin: "This is a transient town; they come and they go; usually they don't have jobs and end up as criminals." (18.8% of Austin's population in 1980 was Hispanic.)

I asked an L.A. artist about Chicano artists.  He described to me how they dressed, but didn't know too much about their art.  Somebody else mentioned two Chicano artists, one of them "gone mainstream recently, cranking out paintings to sell them quick.  He was good before, but now I don't know, he's rushing too much."  Somebody else said: "Oh, Chavez and the grapes; oh, the Marielitos — aren't the Chicanos?" (27.5% of L.A.'s population in 1980 was Hispanic.) In San Francisco, where there is a Mexican museum, the alternative spaces mentioned a Cuban video artist who had moved to New York (San Francisco's population was 12.28% Hispanic in 1980.) Maybe I was asking the wrong people.  The commercial galleries might know.  But they told me they didn't represent ethnic art.  The artists were American and yes, some of them were Hispanic or Chicano, but that was irrelevant.

I decided to look for myself.

At present, there are almost nine million Americans of Mexican descent in the United States.  The artists belonging to this culture are working with a vision shaped by a cross-cultural experience, producing an important visual imagery that emerges from the convergence of an ancient and a contemporary sensibility.

For "Chicano Expressions" I found curators who are experts in the field and Chicanos whose expertise is relevant to their culture not only because they are scholars but also because they are descendants of people who have been in this country for generations.

The present show consists of four consecutive exhibitions of the principal expressions of Chicano culture: visual arts, grafica and urban iconography, murals, and home alters.  The exhibition traces the continuous flow of urban mass culture and life as sources for the present aesthetic exploration of the Chicano fine artists.

Without the help of many people, the exhibition would not have been possible.  I would like to thank Judith Baca, muralist and Artistic Director of SPARC in California, and Kay Turner, folklorist, Associate Director, Texas Folklife Resources for their valuable assistance; Ana María Simo, writer; Rita Starpattern and Santa Barraza, both artists, for their suggestions; Shifra Goldman, art critic and professor at Santa Ana College, California; Carla Stellweg, former Director of Stellweg-Segui Gallery in New York and founder/editor of Artes Visuales Magazine, in Mexico; and Mel Casas, painter and Chairman of the Art Department of San Antonio College, Texas, for their help in the selection process; Gregory Kolovakos, translator and writer, for his generous help; Patricia Anderson, writer and art consultant, for her considerable skills toward the completion of the show.  I would also like to thank all the artists and the lenders to the exhibition for their enthusiastic cooperation and participation.  And special thanks to Tomas Ybarra-Fausto for his time and thoughtfulness.

Inverna Lockpez
Project Director

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INTRODUCTION

Born in the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, Chicano art has been closely aligned with the political goals of the Chicano struggles for self-determination.  As an aesthetic credo, Chicano art seeks to link lived reality to the imagination.  Going against mainstream cultural traditions of art as escape and commodity.  Chicano art intends that viewers respond both to the aesthetic object and to the social reality reflected in it.  A prevalent attitude towards the art object is that it should provide aesthetic pleasure while also serving to educate and edify.  In various modalities, Chicano art is envisioned as a model for freedom, a call to both conscience and consciousness.

Social Context

Although fights for social, political and economic equality have been central tenets of Chicano history since 1848, the efforts to unionize California farmworkers launched by César Chávez in 1965 signaled the resurgence of militant mobilizations known as "El Movimiento."  Among the political fronts arising within it were the rural farmworkers' strikes, urban civil rights activities, land grant confrontations, the student and anti-war movements, and the labor struggles of undocumented workers.

An "art movement" arose concurrently with the various political fronts of "El Movimiento."  It was national in scope and developed outside the dominant museum, gallery, and art publications.  Fluid and tendentious, Chicano art underscores public connection as a guiding principle.  In form and content, Chicano art is grounded in artistic practice and traditions from both Mexico and the United States, yet it manifests an original and complex bi-sensibility.  Visual art functions as the artistic equivalent of the bi-lingual and bi-cultural reality of Chicano life.  Nurtured and developed within two cultures, Chicano art is not merely a replication of Mexican or Anglo-American models but emerges as a self-contained yet fluid configuration.

While recognizing the joining of Chicano art with the basic aim "to show things as they really are," individual artists and artist groups resisted the formulation of a restricted aesthetic program to be followed uniformly.  If the Chicano community was heterogenous, the art forms it inspired would be equally varied.  Although representational modes seemed dominant, some artists opted for abstract and more personal expression.  Artists in this camp felt that the focus of reality could also be inner and subjective, that internal views comprised significant aspects of picturing reality and, concomitantly, that formal and technical methods of presentation should remain varied.

Alternative Visions and Structures 

No matter what the expressive mode or the aesthetic convention, the arduous task of building an audience became primary.  Exhibitions were held in alternative spaces such as parks, church parlors and community centers.  The principal goal was to make art accessible to the masses, to neutralize its rarified elitist aura, and especially to reclaim if from its commodity status with the ideal of returning it to a critical role within the social practices of daily living.

In opposition to the hierarchical, dominant culture with its implicit distinctions of "fine" and "folk" art, attempts were made to eradicate boundaries and to integrate categories.  Everyday life and the lived environment were the prime constituent elements for the new aesthetic.

Critically investigating, validating and incorporating into their work elements resonant with meaning drawn from collective experience, Chicano artists untied the internal

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