Looking at the Archive

This chapter traces the origins of the first Chicano arts organizations and explores how they combine art and commerce, two areas previously considered distinct and contradictory. Focusing on the period 1969–1978, the chapter illustrates how the earliest ventures operated with complex and nuanced views about commerce, politics, community, and the arts. It challenges notions in Chicana/o studies that dismiss commerce as antithetical to Chicano movement or community politics, and it finds that Mechicano Art Center and Goez Art Studios and Gallery exceed notions of civic and cultural engagement, inaugurated pedagogies now central in Chicana/o studies and arts institutions, and mapped a decolonial imaginary for Los Angeles.

Introduction

This chapter introduces how the vernacular concept of the remix exposes and challenges conventions of Chicana/o art discourse that erase the variety of styles, methods, and approaches employed by artists since the height of the Chicano movement. Using the work of artist Sandra de la Loza as a methodology for remixing, the chapter interrogates the dichotomous lens and categories for art and artists that have functioned to render Chicana/o art invisible or improbable. It proposes that the decolonial methods of Anzaldúan theory, such as borderlands and mestiza consciousness, best illuminate the complexity of Chicana/o art and artists in Los Angeles, an ideal site for a capacious analysis of Chicana/o artists, exhibitions, collectors, curators, and institutions.

Conclusion

The book closes with an experimental conclusion that retells three stories about Chicana/o art in Los Angeles and the ways that museum visitors and curators inhabit and reimagine mainstream institutions. Therefore, the last chapter embodies the methodology of the remix by favoring exploration and reconstruction, and thus refusing closure. More importantly, remixing is not simply a reordering of Chicana/o art but a rethinking of the conventions and norms that create its invisibility within American and Latin American art history. The three stories each convey how Chicana/o museum visitors and curators bring their transnational and transmodern interpretations of art, culture, and identity into sites of power. Their interpretations suggest that the future of art history depends upon an inclusive, expansive, and critical methodology in the study of art.

Chicana/o Art Collectors

This chapter analyzes the work of Chicana/o art collectors not as individuals consumed by idiosyncratic obsessions but as a collective of critical witnesses who challenge historical and aesthetic amnesia. Chicana/o art collectors acquire and preserve the cultural patrimony of Chicana/o communities, broadly defined, and thus construct a sense of place for these imagined communities. Rejecting the conventional view that collectors are narcissists, the chapter explores how collectors who are racialized as nonwhite offer new ideas about cultural production and how these sites and practices of collecting embody the public emplacement of Chicana/o art.

Remixing

This chapter remixes the exhibition record in Los Angeles and documents new information about Chicana/o art exhibitions in mainstream museums. Looking at an exhibition long forgotten, most likely because it could not satisfy the current expectations about Chicana/o art and artists, the chapter proposes another index for Chicana/o art. This new index brings to light new understandings of Los Four, a celebrated arts collective and the first group to receive a major exhibition in a mainstream art museum.

Tours of Influence

This chapter documents the influence of Europe and Asia on Chicana/o artists who traveled abroad. It examines the travels of eleven artists and finds that their international journeys influenced their style, composition, and use of color. Europe also taught some artists, such as David Botello and Leo Limón, to invest in public art and art for the people before this orientation was articulated as a platform of the Chicano movement. By taking up a topic long dismissed by scholars, critics, and curators, the chapter offers new insights about Chicana/o art and proposes new methodologies that reject the essentialist tendencies of normative art history and other disciplines that prescribe and presume the biographies of artists of color. The chapter closes with a discussion of the politics of visibility and the challenge of tracing the influence of European aesthetic traditions on marginalized artists without reinforcing the myth of assimilation.

Errata Exhibitions

This chapter explores the errata exhibition, a show that counters a mainstream presentation of art. With the appearance of the errata exhibition in 1975, Chicana feminist artists leveraged institutional critique against both mainstream arts institutions and community-based practices that ignored or narrowly interpreted their work. These artists, including Judy Baca, Barbara Carrasco, and Judithe Hernández, introduced an alternative analysis of Chicana/o art, illuminating the complexity, multiplicity, and generative qualities of their cultural production. The chapter argues that errata exhibitions are undocumented sites of critical borderlands discourse with which art historians, curators, and critics must engage to remain relevant.