Life in Colors: the Chicano Canvas

By Letisia Marquez '94

Published Apr 1, 2008 8:00 AM

Noriega was just shy of 30 when he received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in modern thought and literature in 1991. His dissertation centered on the little-known history of Chicano film and eventually culminated in a book titled Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema.

In 1991, UCLA's Wight Art Gallery asked him to advise them on adding a film program to complement its hugely popular traveling Chicano art exhibit titled Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation. As he participated on panels and other events related to the exhibit, Noriega became friends with some of the Chicano Movement's leading artistic figures, including Rupert Garcia and Amalia Mesa-Bains. "They became my art history teachers," he explains.

Margarita Cabrera, Vocho (Yellow), 2004. Vinyl, batting, thread and car parts. In a series of ongoing sculptures, El Paso resident Cabrera, who grew up on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, replicates products manufactured in maquiladoras, or border assembly plants — coffee pots, toasters, blenders and such — and replaces the plastic parts (produced in Mexico) with vinyl. The piece illustrated here is a life-sized VW Beetle, the so-called "people's car" of Mexico. Until recently, the VW Beetle was produced and sold within Mexico itself; hence, the sculpture is remade entirely out of vinyl.

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York then asked Noriega to present a selection of Chicano artists to the museum's 1993 biennial committee. He was asked to present six Chicano artists, but decided he would show slides for 30 Chicano artists instead. "I wanted to increase the odds. Besides, there were a lot of great artists they needed to see."

Since then, Noriega has been asked by museums throughout the United States to guest-curate numerous art shows on such varied topics as the photography of the American West, Latino installation art and Chicano poster art. So it was no surprise that LACMA tapped Noriega in 2003 to help lead its Latino arts efforts as part of a five-year agreement with the UCLA center.

In addition to partnering with LACMA on Chicano art exhibits, events and research, Noriega's center also is conducting an extensive Latino art survey of Los Angeles with support from the Getty Foundation and digitizing more than 5,000 photographs by Oscar Castillo documenting the Chicano community in Los Angeles since the 1970s for an online searchable database. In 2005, the center also launched a national book series on Latino artists titled A VER: Revisioning Art History.

Julio Cesar Morales, Undocumented Interventions #6, 2005. LightJet print on watercolor paper. This watercolor series was inspired by a story in the San Diego Union-Tribune recounting an attempt to smuggle a 4-year-old girl into the United States inside a "Powerpuff Girls" piñata. The 20-image series is based on coyote stories Morales heard and from the INS Web site, which documents various tactics used to cross the border. In this piece, an automobile seat provides cover for a man trying to make it across the border.

Such efforts are crucial because UCLA research by Gonzalez, now a LACMA curator, revealed that there are few books about Latino artists and that few artists are mentioned in art history books.

"What the center is trying to do is create a space that is as inclusive as possible of all Latino artists and to document what is happening in the Latino arts community," Noriega explains. "We want people 100, 200 years from now to be able to read about an artist and see that person's slide collection, letters, notes and other documents."

The more accessible documentation there is on an artist, the more likely he or she will be studied, written about, and taught in the classroom; hence, the more likely a museum will include them in their exhibitions and permanent collections, Noriega adds. And he's also helped artists with individual projects that expose their art to a larger audience.

One such artist is Gronk, a Chicano art pioneer who rose to prominence as a member of the conceptual art collective "Asco" in the 1970s. Gronk recalls how he couldn't find a planetarium theater to show a short digital piece he'd produced with the University of New Mexico. Noriega lined up a state-of-the-art planetarium theater at Glendale Community College and the center organized a daylong series of screenings that drew an overflow audience. The Walt Disney Company is now supporting an effort to make the program available to L.A.-area high school students.

"Chon's work continues to create space for Chicano artists in academic and art institutions," says Sandra de la Loza, a Los Angeles-based Chicana artist who will show a video installation in the Phantom Sightings exhibit. "His work writing and publishing studies on individual artists and curating exhibitions has definitely led to a better understanding of Chicano art."

Adrian Esparza, One and the Same, 2005. Serape, plastic trim and nails. Esparza playfully takes the color palette of the serape, one that originally was developed out of the colors available from plant-derived dyes, and charts the composition of a 1922 Audley Dean Nichols landscape painting, View of El Paso at Sunset, which Esparza knew from the collection at the El Paso Museum of Art.