LACMA

In the past three years, we have considered the work of many highly talented artists—more than we could possibly represent in a single exhibition. While we have undertaken this process as a curatorial team, we have not always seen eye to eye on the artwork, even when we have agreed on the selection. As curators, we reflect three different generational perspectives, with other differences according to ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In spite of our differences, we stand behind our selections, but we make no claims for them as being representative of something beyond our specific curatorial process. In any case, we would question such claims for an exhibition (here or elsewhere), since art necessarily exceeds the things it can be said to represent. In 1975, lacma presented a juried exhibition of thirty-one young Chicano artists between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six. The exhibition, Chicanismo en el Arte, was one of the first in which lacma played a leadership role in bringing Chicano art to mainstream museums. In 1974, it became the first to exhibit Chicano artists, showcasing the influential art collective Los Four. Two years earlier, lacma itself became, briefly, the world's largest work of Chicano art, when members of the conceptual art group Asco signed their names to the museum entrance. Spray Paint LACMA (also sometimes called Project Pie in De/Face) allegorized the exclusion of Chicano artists by way of an institutional critique: prior to conceiving of the piece, the artists had been told by a curator at lacma that Chicanos made graffiti, not art, hence their absence from the gallery walls. Asco provided a conceptual twist insofar as their signed artwork, the museum, could not fit within its own gallery walls; that is, the public mission of the institution was itself at odds with the aesthetic criteria that determined the curatorial agenda. As a result, Chicano art became a categorical impossibility, and so it could not be seen. After all, Chicanos made graffiti, not art; the day after Asco executed Spray Paint LACMA, the maintenance workers removed the painted phantom that not only confirmed such biases but argued the opposite, too. Phantom Sightings starts with this paradox: both the bias and the resulting exclusion are invisible. The next step, the one charted by Asco and the artists in this exhibition, generates work that engages and challenges the viewer, often without calling attention to its status as art (as in many of the public interventions) or as Chicano (as in some of the gallery-based pieces). The difference here is that the conceptual art is inside the museum, but our message sounds strikingly similar to the curatorial statement in Chicanismo en el Arte more than thirty years ago: these artists are doing something different with respect to cultural identity, social commentary, political protest, and personal expression. And you need to see it. RITA GONZALEZ Assistant Curator, Special Exhibitions Los Angeles County Museum of Art HOWARD N. FOX Curator, Contemporary Art Los Angeles County Museum of Art CHON A. NORIEGA Director, Chicano Studies Research Center University of California, Los Angeles Adjunct Curator, Chicano and Latino Art Los Angeles County Museum of Art Cover of the exhibition catalogue Chicanismo en el Arte, 1975

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