The artist, Carlos Cortez Koyokuikatl, is a Chicagoan, but the setting of his simply wrought but powerful linocut ”Bracero No. 2” is far removed from any urban landscape-including that of Chicago`s West Side Mexican-American community.
It is a flat expanse of farm field, stretching off to a line of mountains. The peaks are snow-covered, but the harsh lines with which he has drawn the field seem to quiver with heat. In the foreground, two farm workers- one stooping, the other standing but bent to work his hoe-seem to be toiling inch by inch over this soil, following the converging lines of the furrows and plantings to no discernible end.
Koyokuikatl`s ”Bracero” was completed in 1967, but in a timeless way it represents the heart and soul of a unique, emotional and revolutionary art exhibition just opened at the Smithsonian Institution`s National Museum of American Art in Washington.
It`s called ”Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985,” and it treats the creativity of the Mexican-American community with care and reverence.
”What impresses me most about this show,” said Virginia Mecklenburg, chief curator of the museum, ”is how much it speaks with the voice of the people.
”This exhibition didn`t result from a few Establishment curators looking over a body of art and deciding what`s best. It`s fully the creation of the Chicano community. It says what they want to say.”
Works in every medium
Ninety artists are represented in the exhibit, the largest number from the Los Angeles area and California, but also artists from Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois and other areas with significant Mexican-American populations.
The 130 works in the show are rendered in every medium. Galesburg`s Maria Luisa Delgado-Partin`s 1983 procession of dwarf-like figurines, ”Descanso,” is done in a primitive sculpture form that would seem familiar to the Indians who settled on the Mexican plateau thousands of years ago.
John Valadez`s 1985 mother-and-daughter oil portrait study ”The Wedding” is done in the style of many 19th Century American realist paintings.
Patssi Valdez` 1983 ”Downtown Los Angeles”-staring faces, drably colored office buildings, dark night sky-is a photo collage.
There are installations, some of them remindful of Mexico`s Day of the Dead constructions in that they resemble altars.
One of these, a 1990 work by San Francisco`s Amalia Mesa-Bains, seems a reverent testament, perhaps to the Virgin Mary, but the icon`s face in its elaborately enshrined photographs is that of the late film star Dolores del Rio.
There are murals, some in the mode of Mexico`s legendary social realist Diego Rivera; others-such as ”La Raza de Oro,” painted on the wall of a building on Chicago`s West Hubbard Street by Jose Gamaliel Gonzales and ”the youths of Westtown”-are done in a timeless, two-dimensional style that reflects both urban reality and an ancient past.
A highly contemporary construction by the Los Angeles performance group Asco posits two video monitors, flashing barrio faces and scenes on their screens, in the tumble-down surroundings of a slum dwelling.
The many photos, all with uniquely Chicano subjects, include Chicagoan Alex Galindo`s maternal study of a ceremonially dressed, middle-age woman seated on the lace covering of a bed, looking as deified as an altar`s icon.
A distinct hybrid
”Chicano art is unique,” said Mecklenburg. ”It grew out of the cultures of both Mexico and the United States, and incorporates parts of both, but it`s distinctly itself.”
The recent race riot in Los Angeles has provoked a new focus on ethnic divisions in America and, along with concern over black-white relations, a renewed interest in what is called the Hispanic community.
But the term is a misnomer, for there is no more a single, distinct Hispanic community in the U.S. than there is a Caucasian one.
Culturally, Mexican-Americans, with their ancient Indian strains and origins, have almost as little in common with the decidedly Spanish Cuban-American middle class of Miami or the predominantly African-descended Puerto Ricans of New York and Chicago as they do with the Yankees of New Hampshire.
Three years ago, as New York`s Metropolitan Museum of Art was preparing to stage its recent and mammoth exhibition of many centuries of Mexican art, Pablo Marantes, then minister of culture at the Mexican Embassy, complained,
”There are only two paintings by Mexican artists in all the museums in the U.S. capital, and both of those are in an office at the Hirshhorn (Museum of Modern Art).”
In response to this neglect, the Mexican government converted its old embassy quarters on Washington`s 16th Street into a museum, and regularly stages exhibitions there for those willing to brave the decaying neighborhood adjacent to it.
The Metropolitan show prompted other New York museums and galleries to stage Mexican exhibitions and events, and it became a spontaneous, citywide festival. But scant attention was paid to Chicano culture.
Then-Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson sent a representative to look at a small Chicano show at the Mexican Embassy`s museum for possible staging in Chicago, but the representative returned to Illinois and never called back.
The Los Angeles County Museum of art has exhibited Chicano paintings in the 1980s, but nothing as far reaching as the Chicano show now in Washington. Heavy political content
Considered the most comprehensive exhibition of Mexican-American art ever organized, ”Chicano Art” has been touring museums in the Southwest and West but has only now reached the East and a showcase of national prominence. After closing July 26, it will travel to the Bronx Museum in New York but will not be put on view in Chicago.
Work on organizing the Chicano show began in 1983, as a project of UCLA`s Wight Art Gallery in Los Angeles.
The heavy political content of the exhibition is intentional. Said Chicago`s Jose Gamaliel Gonzalez: ”Art and culture are my reasons for being. The movement was the stimulating force that motivated me to create MARCH (the Movimiento Artistico Chicano). Thus today we can say, `The Chicanos have arrived.` ”
The exhibition is organized in nine sections, the most political of which is the first, ”La Causa.” Here are Koyokuikatl`s ”Bracero” and other works in tribute to the United Farm Workers movement led by Cesar Chavez.
Here also are stir-the-blood depictions of agrarian reformer turned revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and several figurative studies of Frida Kahlo, the late, long-suffering artist wife of Diego Rivera whose life and work has become much revered by the feminist movement, here and in Mexico.
Mexican art has long been obsessively concerned with death, and so it is with the Chicano. In the ”Urban Life” section, Leo Limon`s ”No Vale Homes” has one skull-masked figure shooting another in an explosive image. In Jose Montoya`s ”Pachuco: A Historical Update,” a zoot-suited skeleton holds a sign saying, ”ART.”
Women figure in this exposition as much as politics, violence and death-in most instances reverentially, as with the beautiful sisters in Cecilia Concepcion Alvarez`s ”Las Cuatas Diego.”
If the grim, uncoiling female figure of Judith Francisca Baca`s
”Uprising of the Mujeres” seems to embody all the dark and angry themes of the exhibit, Carmen Lomas Garza`s sweetly domestic ”Camas para Suenos,”
with two children watching the moon from atop a neatly kept house while their mother prepares their beds in a room beneath, poses a Chicano vision of happiness-and one held in common with all Americans.
