Week 8- "Chicano art: Looking Backward "

 Shifra M. Goldman in her article, “Chicano Art: Looking Backward,” confronts hard questions about the future of Chicanx art work and asks the question “should Chicano artists, at the cost of economic security and possible artistic recognition, continue to express themselves artistically around the same matrix of social change and community service that brought the movement into existence” (436)? She makes the point, through the examination of two contemporary art exhibitions whose themes are on Chicano art, that Chicanx art does not and can not exist within the commercial/Western art world because its very nature, meaning, and purpose is in opposition to it. The showing of mural artwork in exhibitions and making them prints decontextualized the art work and ultimately strips the meaning and purpose away by its removal of its location and environment. The history of Chicanx art work in activism is also another factor that Goldman comments on. Should artwork done always have to have subject matter that pertains to activism, especially when the professional art scene expects only this from Chicanx artists. It can be exclusionary within the own culture and art movement as well as has become a stereotype of what is expected of certain artists. Ultimately, I don’t have an answer to the question. It is a hard question to grapple with and ultimately an unfair one because white artists do not have to do so much grappling about the purpose of their artwork and there are no pressures to fit in a certain mold, they are also not expected to always make political commentary. We also do not look a white artwork in such a way. I don’t agree with everything Goldman has argued but I believe it should be up to artists themselves what they want to create and that unfortunately communities still have and need to put the physical work in fighting against institutions that can be exclusionary, so that Chicanx artists have more room to create whatever they like within in the art scene. Instead of asking Chicanx artists where the art should go based on its past we should be asking major museums why there haven't been more Chicanx and Latinx artists being featured and why they look at them through such a narrow lens.

Mosaic mural by Mario Torero celebrating Chicano history and legacy. Located at UCSD.