LACMA

FOREWORD Since the inception of the Chicano art movement in the late 1960s, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has hosted or organized a number of notable exhibitions, including Los Four in 1974—widely acknowledged as the first exhibition of Chicano art presented at a major museum — as well as Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors (1987), A Tribute to Carlos Almaraz (1992), Gronk! A Living Survey, 1973–1993 (1994), The Road to Aztlán: Art from a Mythic Homeland (2001), Selections from the Cheech Marin Collection (2008), and others. Phantom Sightings, the largest exhibition devoted exclusively to cutting-edge Chicano art in lacma's history, explores art by Mexican American artists who have come to artistic maturity in the 1990s and beyond. To organize this exhibition, lacma invited the participation of the Chicano Studies Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. We established an ongoing partnership of mutual interest under the aegis of a broader Latino arts initiative. Phantom Sightings is the first major program to come from that collaboration, and it is likely that a variety of other programs of Chicano and Latino art and culture will bear fruit in the future. The artists in this show consciously position themselves within the broadest devel- opments of contemporary art. Several of them have international careers. While their art reflects the Chicano experience in a variety of locales, from San Francisco and Los Angeles to San Antonio and New York, these artists do not identify themselves as regional artists, and some may not consider themselves as Chicanos first. They have assimilated mainstream American culture as much as mainstream American culture has assimilated its diverse and divergent demographic. If they are grouped together here as Chicano artists after the Chicano movement, it is not by their own volition or consensus; it is a curatorial artifact, a device to reflect and speculate on the interests and issues facing Chicano artists today. lacma is proud to bring their work together in Phantom Sightings. MICHAEL GOVAN Chief Executive Officer and Wallis Annenberg Director Los Angeles County Museum of Art 11

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