Looking for Mundo Meza

The death of the artist Mundo Meza at age twenty-nine is one of the greatest tragedies of the AIDS crisis. After his death, his extant work was scatteredand all but removed from public access, scholarly documentation, or the broader annals of Chicanx art history. Located in photographic glimpses and media clips, the detritus constituting his archival body of record demands another way of understanding an incomplete and little known oeuvre.. What is revealed in Meza’s marginality are creative practices derived from the trendy underground of Hollywood fashion, shocking window tableaus, and gender nonconforming performance art in East LA. This chapter uncovers the tenuous system ofpartial visions stewarded by his former lover and collaborator, Simon Doonan, and the plastic world of mannequins surrogating his life and memory.

The Iconoclasts of Queer Aztlán

This chapter draws on Cherríe Moraga’s classic essay “Queer Aztlán: The Re-Formation of Chicano Tribe” to distinguish how iconoclasm, the literal breaking of images, has been deployed as a unifying language for queer Chicanx avant-garde formed in the ethnic enclaves of Los Angeles. In institutional discourse, the East LA art collective known as Asco (Spanish for “nausea”) has tended to overshadow queer of color amorphous collectives, artistic circles,and collaborations. With attention to groups like Escandalosa Circle, Butch Gardens School of Art, Pursuits of the Penis, and Le Club for Boys, this chapter elucidates how a bold language faced indifference and sometimes violence in traditional museum settings. With a particular eye on the disciplining of Robert “Cyclona” Legorreta’s unruly archival body, another method and definition of Chicano queer avant-gardisms is demanded and found in the archival body/archival space methodology undergirding the case study chapters.

Introduction

I throw away your oxygen mask Empty pills bottles and favorite hats Remove the lint from the dryer Thinking if I get rid of your death, Mi Amor (Your Denim Shirt) Then the virus that killed you Won’t live in my clothes (Your Denim Shirt)...

Viral Delay/Viral Display

No person better defined the collaborative gestalt of queer Chicano art practices than Joey Terrill. As a principal figure in the Escandalosa Circle, he bore witness to his friends’ HIV infection and eventual demise. This chapter examines the queer visual testimonios engendered by his scene paintings and portraits. As it follows his excursions between coasts, it shows him rendering sights of contagion, whether on a Fire Island beach in New York or a hazardous garden in Beverly Hills. Terrill’s retrospectively eyes his HIV transmission in self-analytical portraits tempered by a pathogenic time stamp, creating what is arguably the most consistent visual account of AIDS in American art. The implications of his queer visual testimonios on canvas and paper have profound meaning for collectors rearticulating their domestic environments with traces of Terrill’s retrospective examinations of HIV infection and terminal illness.

A Roll/Role of the Dice

Meza’s archival dissolution had profound effects on his contemporaries, among them Teddy Sandoval. This chapter examines how two disparate sites, the home and public art space, conjoin in shared networks of ceramics repatriated after his death in 1995. Focusing on the custodial efforts of his partner and estate executor, Paul Polubinsaks, the chapter utilizes an archive elicitation process to unpack Sandoval’s diverse art practices and avant-garde collaborations ranging from faux finishes, renegade street graffiti, transgender fictions of self, and mail art personae. It also discusses the posthumous completion of his Gateway to Highland Park for a commuter rail station in Los Angeles and details what became LA’s first Latinx AIDS memorial.

Conclusion

Galvanized by Terrill’s speculative art practice, This chapter proposes an addition to the archival body/archival space study model in the form of the virtual queer archival laboratory. Taking a page from feminist art history and AIDS art activism’s institutional critique, this study concludes through a virtual shuttling across vignettes and variant strands of time and space, reimagining alternative afterlives for the collections it has surveyed. From a book fair, to a haberdashery, toa colossal pre-Columbian ruin, each site represents speculative encounters through a failed project from the museum’s past: the cast collection. Through the language of the reprint, replica, and revisitation, another engagement with the museum and archive emerges grasping Chicanx art’s queer future through a virtual key.