Speaking to the Community

Speaking to the Community 

"In 1972, the Chicano art collective ASCO tagged the outside of LACMA, because the museum didn’t show Chicano artists. Two years later, the museum gave another Chicano group, Los Four, a show. But for the museum, it was barbarians at the gate." ​​​​​​​

- Cheech Marin, Chicano art collector, "Cholo Graffiti.", 2011. 

After the Chicano art movement, Chicano artists struggled to gain entrance into museums and be regarded as professional artists.

ASCO. Spray Paint LACMA. 1972. Photo by Harry Gamboa​​​​​​​

“It’s always been my contention that Chicanos are a co-equal culture and capable of participating and sharing and contributing. At some level, [the show] just gives people hope that it’s possible to actually create work and have it recognized as being art.”

- Harry Gamboa, member of ASCO artists group who tagged the LACMA

"I was in the first wave of students of color that got into the universities and I was at San Francisco State. So it was a time when I think some of the art instructors or professors didn’t really understand what we were doing. They didn’t really know how to address it and so a lot of times our work was seen as Ethnic art. They didn’t really have a category for it, other than that it was Ethnic. Often they put you down because they weren’t images that they were used to seeing but nevertheless we did what we wanted to do because that's part of what it meant to be a Chicano and take a stand." 

- Juan Fuentes, Chicano poster artist, Telephone interview, 2021.

In many ways, Chicano artists, despite being in different regions, had similar experiences. Professional art schools and the professional art world were not always open to Chicano art. Therefore, artists took to the streets and the communities to display their art. 

“That raised for me the idea of ‘art for the people’. That was important to me because I was reconsidering all the myths I have learned about the fine artists. That you’re elite and you’re beyond and you also turn your back on society. Well the Chicano movement was the opposite of that. It made us look at society, get involved in society and make images that were understandable by us the artists and also the folks in the neighborhood.”

- Rupert Garcia, Chicano silkscreen artist​​​​​​​

“We were uniting and we were speaking our minds. While our parents, including mine, were worrying about us, when we go out to the demonstrations, that we would be hurt because we were outspoken. We were artists and we were graffitiing on, Que Viva La Revolucion(long live the revolution).”

- Mario Torero, Chicano muralist and printmaker 

United Farm Worker protest, c.1970. Photo by Patricia López-Boron

“It was uniting the community. It was talking to the community. It was painting paintings that were for everybody. It was taking paintings that were in the museum and putting them on the street.”

- Patricia Rodriguez, Chicana artists and part of Mujeres Muralistas

Chicano art was used for education, expressing cultural identity, and ultimately empowering the community to work toward social justice. 

“When the Chicano Moratorium occurred, there was a struggle against the War in Vietnam, I started to see thousands of Mexican people come out and that was overwhelming. I'd never seen that happen before in my life. I never saw that many people congregated except maybe at church but never thousands of people marching to say, "we're dying in extraodinary rates in Vietnam". And they were my friends. I was the age which the boys from my neighborhood where being taken into the War in Vietnam. A lot of them weren't coming back and a lot of them were coming back messed up. So when I saw that I saw something really major a foot.”

- Judy Baca, Chicano muralist, Videoconference interview, 2021.

Youth from South Central L.A. arrive at Belvedere Park for La Marcha por la Justicia. 1971. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Photo by Luis C. Garza

During protest over apprehension of Spanish Americans in Denver
     bus bombing case. 11 Feb. 1970. Denver Public Library. Photo by Howard Brock

Chicana demonstrator in the neighborhood of Lincoln Heights.
     1969. Photo by George Rodriguez

“At a certain point, I knew there was a moviemento and I knew that I was part of it but I didn't go to all the meetings with the men because my job would have been to get them coffee. And I wasn't about to do that. I was more like I'm gonna invent my own thing and that's why I invented SPARC - Social and Public Art Center. Which is the place that I still work with and why I stay affiliated with it because it keeps me honest and it keeps me on the straight and narrow, it keeps me connected to communities so I know what it is that our people are really concerned with. What is happening in the neighborhood.”

- Judy Baca, Chicano muralist, Videoconference interview, 2021. 

The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1981. SPARC Archive.

Hernandez, Judithe. El Mundo De Barrio Sotel. 1976. Members of the Sotel Gang in front of completed mural.

“It's art for the people. We don't have to go to a gallery to see something beautiful. We see it being created. It's not a mystery how that art got there. We see the people outside day after day. We see that it's a whole crew, rarely is it one individual that does everything. Seeing the collective aspect of the creation of a mural can be really empowering too and could show folks that there's a place for them.”​​​​​​​ 

- Katynka Martinez, Chicano Studies Professor at San Francisco State University​​​​​​​, Videoconference interview, 2021. 

“The whole idea of creating is to not only creat for ourselves but to reflect our communities and to instill pride in our young people.”

- Barbara Carrasco, Chicana muralist, LA Plaza Village Mural Corridor, 2019.

Communal event in front of La Ofrenda mural. 1990.

“Not only was it art for the people in the places that they lived and worked, but it was an organizing tool. For me it was a way of teaching young people about their culture, about history, about what they held in common, and in fact working with the ideas of what they could aspire to or who they might want to be. So in a sense, we were painting peoples dreams.”

- Judy Baca, Chicana muralist