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Inside [[logo]] Advice 6H, Arts 7H, Between Us 3H, Movies 5H, Music 4H, Spaces 8,9H, What's Up 2H, Weddings 11-13H Sunday, August 23, 1998 San Antonio Express-News S.A. life [[logo]] [[picture]] H Section [[logo]] Arts etc. [[logo]] Firelight Players building audiences for the future. Page 7H Health & Fitness - Family - Arts & Entertainment - Style - Smart Consumer - Home & Garden www.expressnews.com/salife This page is recyclable Profile Curing 'cultural myopia' Con Safo group helped bring Chicano artists' work into wider view By Elda Silva Express-News Staff Writer [[image - painting]] 'Vato con High School Jacket' is by César Martinez. In the 1960s Con Safo, a group of Chicano artists, came together in San Antonio with a clear purpose: to kick open the doors of museums and galleries closed to them. The group has been largely forgotten today, especially since it disintegrated in the mid-'70s, but the impact in the mid-'70s, but the impact it had on Chicano art continues to be felt. And former members -- such as Mel Casas, Jesse Almazan, Kathy Vargas, César Martinez, Carmen Lomas Garza, Santa Barraza and Jesse Treviño -- remain among the most vital artists to emerge from the Chicano art movement. Today, their works are in major museums and held in private and corporate collections. "Con Safo, in my opinion, really was able to get artists viewed by the larger public, primarily artists who were not being shown in museums at the time," says Andrew Connor, associate curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art. "There were a number of reasons why they were not being shown in museums at the time," he adds. "Most of them boiled down to not very flattering things about the art world." Venues had problems with the content of the artwork, says César Martinez, who joined the group after he came to San Antonio 1971. "You have to keep in mind these were different times, he says. "Racial [[image - photograph]] KIN MAN HUI/Staff Jesse Almazan, a founder of Con Safo, says its members dealt with mainstream exhibit sites on the artists' terms. 'They wanted the artist to pay for everything, like they were doing you a favor. We turned it around. That was Con Safo way.' attitudes were different, and the Chicano movement was in the process of eliminating all of that institutionalized discrimination. It will always be there, but it's no longer as institutionalized as it was." Mel Casas, one of the founding members of the group, points to "cultural myopia" as a factor in the exclusion of Chicano artists. The group's only option was to organize and "force the issue," says Casas, 68, former chairman of the art department at San Antonio College. Con Safo was the brainchild of artist and educator Felipe Reyes, who had belonged to earlier groups such as Pintores de la Nueva Raza. Reyes approached Casas with the ideal and, together with Almazan, founded Con Safo with a handful of local artists. The group took their name from the urban environment that gave rise to it. Con Safo, scrawled on walks alongside or under grafitti as C/S, means King's - See CON SAFO/10H [[image - photograph]] RODOLFO B. ORNELAS/Staff Mel Casas, another founder says the movement 'was an instigator. By that, I mean it was a radical group wanting to make its presence known.'
