LACMA to put spotlight on local Latino artists

The two veteran curators from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art appeared uncharacteristically distracted during a visit last year with Chon A. Noriega, director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. In conversation, the pair kept looking up at the wall of Noriega’s campus office.

The professor didn’t know what to make of the apparent inattention. He had been meeting with them regularly to discuss a plan he considered of critical importance to the future of Latino and Chicano art, his pride and specialty.

For once, a major arts institution was exploring ways to permanently incorporate U.S.-based Latino artists into its exhibitions and acquisitions. The curators were looking to Noriega for advice on ambitious plans that would send a historic signal about the legitimacy of local Latino art, heretofore largely marginalized by the arts establishment.

So why did the visitors keep staring at the wall? Finally, Noriega recalled, one of them asked: “Excuse me, but who is that artist?”

The curators had been riveted by a suite of four prints by Camille Rose Garcia, an L.A.-born artist raised in Orange County.

Titled “Doomsday Animals,” the drawings depicted “the story of nature’s plight during Armageddon” through cartoonish but tragic figures such as the “one-eyed spider widow” and the “great blind heron.”

Noriega put the curators in touch with the artist. Weeks later, he discovered to his delight, LACMA had purchased her work for its permanent collection.

“Hey, we’re off and running!” Noriega thought. “They’re putting their money where their mouth is. It’s one thing to have an exhibition, to put things up on the wall and send them back. It’s another to be developing the permanent collection of the museum itself.”

Tonight, LACMA officials plan to announce the launch of the Latino Arts Initiative, a five-year plan to develop exhibitions, publications, research projects and artistic collections based on a partnership between the museum and the Chicano Studies Research Center on UCLA’s Westwood campus.

The agreement to link institutions, not just individuals, is the first of its kind in the museum’s history, said Andrea L. Rich, LACMA’s president and director. The museum hopes to enrich its program by tapping into the resources at the multidisciplinary Chicano center, founded in 1969.

“We can do a much deeper, broader, more profound presentation of Latino art together than either of us could do apart,” Rich said in an interview Monday at the museum.

The first step came last summer, when LAMCA named Noriega adjunct curator of Chicano and Latino art in the museum’s Center for the Art of the Americas.

Noriega, who teaches in UCLA’s department of film, television and digital media, is an expert in Latino visual and performing arts.

He sits on Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn’s Council for the Arts and since 1996 has been editor of the Chicano studies journal Aztlan, founded in 1970.

Noriega has spearheaded his own arts initiatives at the university. He organized the Chicano Cinema Recovery Project to help restore and preserve independent films. His center is publishing a series of books on Latino artists who have made major contributions but have been largely ignored by the academic press.

He is also leading a drive to preserve the history of L.A.’s Latino arts organizations. Earlier this year, he called a summit of 18 groups, including Self Help Graphics & Art and the Social and Public Art Resource Center.

“We’re now at a point where a lot of Latino arts organizations are 30, 35 years old,” Noreiga said. “The first generation of the founders is retiring and dying off, and a new generation is replacing them. Sometimes in these transitions, you lose a lot of materials, and the organizations themselves were on the verge of losing their own institutional memories.... So the first thing we did was bring together all of these art groups and really talk to them about the need to preserve their own history.”

Those grass-roots relationships will be crucial for LACMA, which hopes to establish its own dialogue with the Latino arts community.

Noriega said LACMA, like other major arts institutions, has felt pressure to do more than the occasional exhibition on Chicano and Latino art. Although the museum was on the cutting edge of spotlighting Chicano art in the 1970s, he said, the effort since had been spotty.

“I think they were perfectly aware they didn’t have a terribly strong track record to point to,” Noriega said Monday.

“They had some pretty exceptional moments, but nothing you could call ongoing. They knew they needed to move in this direction, and they knew they didn’t have the expertise in-house.”

Rich, the museum’s president, said she’s been moving in the direction of Latino art since she came to LACMA in 1995. She called it “a very typical, encyclopedic museum” at the time, one that made no real effort to connect to the region’s changing population.

Two years later, the museum had acquired the Bernard and Edith Lewin Collection of modern Mexican art, a milestone in the drive to make LACMA a leader in the field.

It was followed by an installation of pre-Columbian art from the museum’s permanent collection and special exhibitions of colonial art, works by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and, most recently, “The Road to Aztlan,” an exhibition based on the mythology of Mexico’s indigenous origins.

The missing link was the work of contemporary Latino and Chicano artists from the United States. In an effort to be relevant and accessible to its local audience, the museum had looked to Mexico and beyond, but it had overlooked artists in its own backyard.

Rich sees the latest move as “the final culmination of this whole journey.”

What does she say to critics who ask why it took so long?

“Look, an encyclopedic museum, like a university, is a very conservative institution,” Rich said. “It’s there to grow quietly over time, not to react quickly to fads.... You want to wait to make sure what you’re investing in is going to stand the test of time.” Now, she said, Chicano art has come of age. It has earned a permanent place within the museum’s Center for the Art of the Americas, which takes a pan-American view of art in the hemisphere.

“It gives a validation to Chicano artists,” Rich said. “When you’re buying art, as a museum you’re saying, ‘Ah, this is part of us now. It can’t just go away.’ ”