Week 8: Chicano Art--Looking Backward

     In “Chicano Art: Looking Backward” by Shifra M. Goldman critically analyzes Chicano art in the past that is put into retrospective and is genuine within future work. There are two exhibitions of the backward-looking California art community featuring the “pioneers”: Califas: An Exhibition of Chicano Artists in California and Murals of Aztlán: The Street Painters of East Los Angeles. The main argument is “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 their movement into existence?…” (436). The Chicano movement artists often present their work on silkscreen posters and murals, that demonstrate their work as a collective to create an alternative cultural structure for mainstream indifferences or hostility during the contemporary Chicano art expression.

    A controversy that arises is the use of a canvas for a the “mural”, Murals of Aztlán created in 1981 at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles. Murals are large scale paintings that are generally for the public for the public to see, “For the street mural, location is part of its content, and its subject matter is meaningful to the residents in whose environment it is placed.” (439). With a backlash, this work was not accepted as “folk art”, it was created for contemporary art for a mainstream audience. Having this being put up for show as a non traditional audience watches, glorifies this showing to be “exotic” and alienating nature of an event.