Chicano art, beyond rebellion – ‘Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement’ provides a rare showcase at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

VISITORS to the sprawling Chicano art show opening today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are greeted by a display of photos depicting a group of daring guerrilla street artists known as ASCO, Spanish for “nausea.” The photographs are from the early 1970s — which seems to defy the show’s title, “Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement.”

In one famous photo from 1972, in the midst of the movement, the museum itself was the target of these Dadaesque subversives protesting the exclusion of Chicano art from its galleries. In “Spray Paint LACMA,” ASCO member Patssi Valdez is seen posing outside the museum’s walls, which had been tagged overnight by her rebellious cohorts, Gronk, Willie Herron III and Harry Gamboa Jr. This act of creative defiance — turning the building into a Chicano canvas — is now enshrined in the very place that sparked the protest by treating Chicanos as the phantoms of the art world. So does this mean that Chicano artists have finally found the acceptance they sought? That they can now put down their spray cans and pursue careers as equals in a harmonious “post-ethnic” art world?”*

*From: www.latimes.com
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

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