Ramón García – författare

At his untimely death in 1998, photographer Ricardo Valverde (b. 1946) had for almost three decades documented the various communities and social spaces of Los Angeles. Though he began this lifelong pursuit while still in college, capturing the streets of his South Central neighborhood and the urban landscape of downtown Los Angeles, it wasn’t until the Watts Riots of 1965 that Valverde and his work became deeply political. But if his work became more political, it did so within an aesthetic that grew ever more critical of the tropes and institutions of documentary art.Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, this book-in the landmark A Ver: Revisioning Art History series-records the unfolding of Valverde’s vision, from his first photographs of L.A. streets as repositories of the city’s social history, to his socially and politically acute portraiture, to his surrealist-inflected mixed-media work late in his career, to his role in the formation of the community-based arts groups Self-Help Graphics & Art, Ojos, and Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous. RamÓn GarcÍa’s essay offers a clear framework for understanding Valverde’s art and life, along with a sense of the personal and social politics and history that influenced both so thoroughly.

By evoking the Old Testament book referenced in the title of the collection, The Chronicles recounts distinctive aspects of a Mexican American’s presence in California. Fairy tales, bible stories, and Greek myths are reinvented as the genealogy of a poet obsessed by memory and the transformations of dislocation. The Frog Prince longs to be a frog again, Sleeping Beauty doesn’t know who she is, Medusa is a misunderstood femme-fatale, Bluebeard is a desired eccentric, and Marilyn Monroe wins the first annual Miss Artichoke beauty contest. Ramón García brings to life landscapes populated by misfits who find—like their mythical counterparts—a sense of belonging between the marvelous and the ordinary, memory and reality. In coming to terms with the intricacies of immigration and migration, García defamiliarizes well-known tales, rewriting enchanting and disturbing versions of stories we thought we knew.