Ver – serie

Gronk was born in 1954 in the barrios of East Los Angeles. An autodidact by circumstance, he began his career as an urban muralist who had to look up the word “mural” to know whether he could paint one. Over time, he has grown into an international figure who has created grand sets for operas and computerized animation for panoramic screens. In this sweeping examination of Gronk’s oeuvre, Max Benavidez elucidates how the artist can cross genres, sexual categories, and ethnic barriers, yet still remain true to himself. From street murals to mail art, from large-scale action painting to performance art and operatic set design, Gronk has made a lasting mark on the Chicano art movement, the punk scene, gay art, and the cultural world stage. As a founder of the East L.A. avant-garde art collective Asco (Spanish for nausea), Gronk and his contemporaries responded to Hollywood’s rejection of Chicanos by creating a conceptual countercinema, the No Movie, that incorporated Hollywood imagery and style even as it wickedly dissected the banality and biases of the mass media. In collaborations with Cyclona, Mundo Meza, Jerry Dreva, and Tomata DuPlenty, Gronk challenged the limits of sexuality, gender norms, and taste.  What Benavidez ultimately reveals is Gronk’s uncanny power to reinvent himself and his art, moving through one vivid artistic and subcultural scene to another. Add large doses of Gronk’s wit, irony, and talent and you have the story of his major contribution not only to Chicano art but to late twentieth-century culture.  Max Benavidez is a writer, independent scholar, essayist for the Los Angeles Times, and a consultant to a wide range of cultural and academic institutions.

Working for more than four decades in a variety of media, from drawings and paintings to murals and the silkscreen prints for which he is best known, Malaquias Montoya has pursued a singular artistic vision that promotes the dignity of labor, exposes assaults on human rights, and provokes resistance in the face of injustice. Montoya cofounded the influential Chicano artist collective known as the Mexican-American Liberation Art Front in 1968, inspiring a generation of artists and activists and continuing to do so today through his teaching and by widely exhibiting his overtly political and visually arresting works.

One of the most revered members of “the Miami Generation,” a group of Cuban-born artists who emigrated to the United States, MarÍa Brito is a painter, sculptor, and installation artist best known for her elaborately constructed room-like works that embody narratives of loss and displacement. Brito also draws on personal iconography to create challenging works that are at once deeply autobiographical and reflect a profound fluency with the history of Western art. In this new volume in the landmark A Ver series and the first major book on Brito’s career, Juan A. Martinez examines the unique interplay of the personal and the universal in this Miami-based artist’s diverse mixed-media works.

“It is important for us to be visually literate; it is a survival skill. The media is what passes for culture in contemporary U.S. culture, and it is extremely powerful. It is crucial that we systematically explore the cultural misdefinition of Mexicans and Latin Americans that is presented in the media.” -Yolanda LÓpez Chicana artist Yolanda LÓpez achieved international recognition for her groundbreaking and controversial Virgin of Guadalupe series of paintings (1975–78) in which she transformed the beloved icon in order to celebrate and sanctify ordinary Mexican and Mexican American women as hardworking, assertive, and vibrant. Born in San Diego, California, LÓpez formally trained as a painter but has since expanded into a variety of media, including installation, video, and slide presentations. Karen Mary Davalos identifies the themes and concerns that unify the artist’s diverse body of work. At times playful, political, and feminist, LÓpez is unwavering in her commitment to representing the experiences of Mexican American women in the United States, confronting stereotypes about Latin Americans and challenging U.S. immigration policy. Karen Mary Davalos is associate professor of Chicano/a studies at Loyola Marymount University and the author of Exhibiting Mestizaje.

A conceptual and multimedia artist known for her writing, photography, painting, installation, and public art, Celia Alvarez Muñoz has been invited to exhibit and to create site-specific works for more than fifty major U.S. museums and was included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial. In her work Muñoz draws on family and communal memories to explore her own experiences growing up Catholic and Mexican American on the Texas-Mexico border, as well as larger issues concerning the spaces between languages and cultures and the histories that connect place to community.With more than one hundred color photographs, this book in the landmark A Ver series surveys Muñoz's career from her earliest bookmaking project, the Enlightenment series, and such installation pieces as Stories Your Mother Never Told You to her more recent works of public art and digital photography. Throughout his in-depth essay, Roberto Tejada illuminates Muñoz's feminist perspective, political engagement, and provocative use of ideas and artifacts from two cultures.

Widely known for works that celebrate the traditions of her family and her South Texas Latino community, Carmen Lomas Garza has been active as a painter, printmaker, muralist, and children’s book illustrator since the 1970s. Born in Kingsville, Texas, she experienced institutionalized racism in a segregated school system that punished Mexican American students for speaking Spanish. Through her art, which draws on her childhood memories and depicts the relationship between family and community, Garza challenges the legacy of repression while establishing the folk art idiom, as employed by nonwhite and immigrant artists, as a vital element of American modernism.Garza’s art illustrates how, despite racial inequities, cultural conflict, and urban pressures, the Mexican American community has sustained a rich and vital cultural identity. In this volume of the pathbreaking A Ver series, Constance Cortez explores Garza’s artwork in the context of the Chicano/a art movement, family and regional traditions, and Garza’s own political and social activism.

PepÓn Osorio is an internationally recognized artist whose richly detailed installations challenge the stereotypes and misconceptions that shape our view of social institutions and human relationships. Osorio’s colorful, often riotous installations are constructed from found objects and things that he customizes or creates. With a wry sense of humor, he probes sober topics, including prison life, domestic violence, AIDS, and poverty.Osorio’s collaborative site-based works develop from his immersion into a community-residents of urban ethnic neighborhoods, employees who provide social services, children in foster care-and the discussions that result. As he addresses difficult themes such as race and gender, death and survival, and alienation and belonging, Osorio asks his audience to reconsider their assumptions and biases. In this book, Jennifer A. GonzÁlez shows that although Osorio draws on his Puerto Rican background and the immigrant experience for inspiration, his artistic statements bridge geographical barriers and class divides. Osorio’s installations have been exhibited internationally, and his work is represented at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and other major museums. He has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1999.

In this examination of the art of Rafael Ferrer, Deborah Cullen considers the creative evolution of the Puerto Rican–born, U.S.-based artist, widely recognized and critically acclaimed for postminimalist environments constructed during the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s Ferrer turned to painting, producing vibrant figurative canvases that depict life in the Caribbean-an apparently abrupt change that surprised the art world. Cullen traces Ferrer’s trajectory, beginning with his early experiments in surrealism and continuing to the small-scale collages, chalkboard drawings, and paper-bag faces that represent his latest work. She explores the links that tie these works together, including Ferrer’s concern with current events and personal memory, his deep understanding of art history, and his restless, probing curiosity.Now in his seventies, Ferrer is, as Cullen notes, more productive than ever. Pizarras (Blackboards), a major installation piece from 2005 and 2006, is composed of ninety-seven wood-framed slate tablets filled with grisaille paintings that combine Spanish wordplay and iconic shapes and doodles. The blackboards mark Ferrer’s continued involvement with urban discourse and commitment to his role as a chronicler of his culture.

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.

Cuban American artist Luis Cruz Azaceta addresses what author Alejandro Anreus calls the “wounds and screams” of the human condition. Although Cruz Azaceta’s work is extensively exhibited and widely collected, this is the first book on the artist’s life and creations.Anreus traces Cruz Azaceta’s career and explores the themes that are the focus of his singular art. Anreus discusses how the Cuban diaspora, above all, has shaped the artist and how the experience of exile has found expression through starkly forceful self-portraiture in many of his works. Anreus also examines the artist’s ongoing concern with current events. Cruz Azaceta has responded to national crises, such as the AIDS epidemic, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, with graphically powerful paintings, mixed-media pieces, and installations.Over the past four decades Cruz Azaceta has experimented with his visual vocabulary, moving from the flat, pop style of his early canvases, through neo-Expressionism, and into the abstraction of more-current work. His commentary on humanity, however, has not changed. His art continues to remind us that there are no easy solutions to the presence of violence and cruelty, exile and dislocation, and solitude and isolation.

Behind the fascinating public artist’s practice of collaborationJudith F. Baca is best known for the Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976–83), a vibrant 2,740-foot mural in Los Angeles that presents an alternative history of California-one that focuses on the contributions of marginalized and underrepresented communities. The mural is emblematic of Baca’s pioneering approach to creating public art, a process in which members of the community are essential contributors to the conception and realization of the work.Anna Indych-LÓpez explores Baca’s oeuvre, from early murals painted with local gang members in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles to more recently commissioned works. She looks in depth at the Great Wall and considers the artist’s ongoing work with the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, California, a nonprofit group founded by Baca in 1976. Throughout, Indych-LÓpez assesses what she calls Baca’s “public art of contestation” and discusses how ideas of collaboration and authorship and issues of race, class, and gender have influenced and sustained Baca’s art practice.

Behind the fascinating public artist’s practice of collaborationJudith F. Baca is best known for the Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976–83), a vibrant 2,740-foot mural in Los Angeles that presents an alternative history of California-one that focuses on the contributions of marginalized and underrepresented communities. The mural is emblematic of Baca’s pioneering approach to creating public art, a process in which members of the community are essential contributors to the conception and realization of the work.Anna Indych-LÓpez explores Baca’s oeuvre, from early murals painted with local gang members in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles to more recently commissioned works. She looks in depth at the Great Wall and considers the artist’s ongoing work with the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, California, a nonprofit group founded by Baca in 1976. Throughout, Indych-LÓpez assesses what she calls Baca’s “public art of contestation” and discusses how ideas of collaboration and authorship and issues of race, class, and gender have influenced and sustained Baca’s art practice.

A generously illustrated account of the life and work of the prominent Chicano artist, educator, and activistJosÉ Montoya (1932–2013) was a leading figure in bilingual and bicultural expression drawn from barrio life as a defining feature of U.S. culture. As an artist, poet, and musician, he produced iconic works depicting pachuco and pachuca culture based on his own experiences as a youth after World War II. These include the poem “El Louie” as well as thousands of political posters and masterful sketches. Montoya cofounded the art collective Royal Chicano Air Force and helped organize for the United Farm Workers. An influential educator, he established the Barrio Art Program in the early 1970s, and taught at California State University, Sacramento.Author Ella Maria Diaz examines a remarkable career that traversed decades, languages, media, and genres. This book is illustrated with reproductions of Montoya’s art from rarely seen archival slides and documents, as well as from private collections and the Montoya estate. Through oral histories and archival research, Diaz proposes a new model for the study of Latina/o/x artists who reject the boundaries between visual art, poetry, music, education, and community activism.This book is distributed for the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA.

The life and work of a celebrated multimedia artist, cultural and feminist theorist, and community organizerAmalia Mesa-Bains has garnered international recognition for multimedia installations that evoke the Chicana experience. This lively book recounts pivotal moments from her life, career, and collaborations, examining the intertwined worlds of Latinx culture, social movements, and contemporary art. Esteemed cultural historian TomÁs Ybarra-Frausto relates Mesa-Bains’s life to contemporary events and her artistic and intellectual production to her concept of domesticana (a feminist interpretation of rasquachismo) and her mestiza identity. He demonstrates how the Chicano Movement attuned the artist to her Mexican heritage, sparking her interest in the traditional home altars that became the aesthetic and cultural inspiration for her installation art. Employing detailed descriptions and analyses of key works, this book is an “art historical biography-memoire,” offering a uniquely personal understanding of Mesa-Bains’s prolific artistic practice and situating her life and art in the cultural and political milieu of the United States since the 1960s. Distributed for UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press.