On-the-Wall Latino Art at LACMA

In his early artistic life, Carlos Almaraz branded the walls of the East Los Angeles barrio with angry political iconography, campaigning for California grape workers’ rights (“Boycott Gallo Wine”) and proclaiming the dignity of Chicanos (“We’re Not Slaves of Immigration”).

The work was subsidized by the Department of Recreation and Parks, which initially offered Chicano muralists $45.50 per artist, 12 gallons of paint, two ladders and a plank.

“Hey, you’re going to kill yourselves!” Almaraz warned his cohorts, who collectively went on strike, refusing to paint, and penned a protest manifesto to the city government. Their actions brought a substantial increase in the amount of the grants and safe scaffolding for the artists. In the process, Almaraz also came to understand the subtleties of institutional support for minority art.

Today, Almaraz’s art is not only off the street, but also on display in the quintessentially mainstream environment of a major museum exhibition. On Sunday, “Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors,” which features 180 works by Latino artists, will open at the County Museum of Art.

The exhibit, which began at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts in May, 1987, and was organized by curators Jane Livingston and John Beardsley of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, has been praised as ambitious and courageous by critics and curators. It is also regarded by Los Angeles artists--seven of them are in the show--as recognition that’s long overdue.

The most vocal of the group, though he regards himself as less militant now, Almaraz has retained his edgy wariness of institutions.

“They’re not interested in Hispanic art. It’s like the song, just ‘Another Op’nin’, Another Show,’ ” he says, noting that the last Latino art exhibition at the museum was “Los Four” in 1974. “This is supposed to appease the peasants. People will be quiet for another 15 years.”

In lesser degrees, the other artists concur that the city’s Latino contingent has been largely ignored by its leading museums. Says Frank Romero, who also grew up in East Los Angeles, “Museums are elitist. They still defer to the East Coast. Chicano art is a different aspect of American art. It’s not what’s going on in New York.”

Roberto Gil de Montes, who came here from Mexico as a teen-ager and feels at home in the multiracial mix, nevertheless finds prejudice expressed in the lack of concern for Latino art. “That’s where I really see that the culture is different. People in control prefer a certain kind of art and that excludes minorities.”

Of the artists being exhibited, Gronk (who uses a single name) most explicitly demonstrated his displeasure at the customary invisibility of Latino art. Along with a group called Asco, which means nausea in Spanish, referring to the quality of their art, he undertook a mission dubbed “Pie and Deface,” spray-painting the doors of the museum in 1972 to protest the absence of Latino art.

Two years later, the museum mounted the “Los Four” show. For the occasion, Almaraz, Romero, Gilbert Lujan and Robert de la Rocha covered the pristine white museum walls with murals in bright hues of turquoise and coral. Meanwhile, on the streets of the barrio, Gronk was making a name for himself as “the Skid Row manicurist,” painting the toenails of derelicts. “I was bringing beauty wherever I could,” he says.

“They were full of talent and revolutionary zeal that was in fun more than in anger,” Livingston now says.

However, the major criticism of the current show, noted at its start, was that it did not include rawer Chicano political art. Rebuts Livingston, “That was specifically what we were not doing. Insofar as people in the United States know Hispanic art, they know murals and grape workers’ posters. What people have not been aware of is that these are fine artists, that they are just as good and just as influential on American art as anybody else. That’s what I was concerned about.”

Still, artists note an aesthetic cohesiveness among Latino communities and a bicultural view of contemporary American life in which sociopolitical comment is implicit.

“You don’t see Reagan shaking hands with an Indian, but you sense there’s something political,” says Almaraz, whose expressionistic “Greed” depicts two desert dogs tearing at a whitened bone. Of the other Los Angeles artists, Gronk satirizes American faith in machine-made might in “Cabin Fever,” a portrait of wealthy revelers aboard the Titanic; Romero expresses the clash of Anglo and Latino cultures in his “Closing of Whittier Boulevard”; Lujan has wittily decorated a low-rider 1957 Chevy with animals and chile peppers, Gil de Montes pokes fun at Angelenos’ belief in illusion and John Valadez paints barrio portraits.

However, it is the stature of Mexican-born Robert Graham, a highly successful artist whose work is widely exhibited, that represents the show’s curatorial vision for Latinos. Says Gronk, “I don’t like entering into the museum world through the door that says for Hispanics only. It’s almost as if it were the Cotton Clubs of 1989 (where white New York audiences watched black entertainers in Harlem in the ‘20s and ‘30s). This has to fall by the wayside. The next step is to see whether I can show just as an artist.”

Los Angeles artists agree that the show has been a tremendous boost to their careers and, as for politics, says Romero, “Being Chicano and doing art and getting it into the museum is itself political.”