LACMA

72 NOTES My thanks to Chon Noriega for his usual acuity with subtitles. I would also like to thank Chon, Howard N. Fox, C. Ondine Chavoya, and Sara Cody for their editorial input. 1. Arturo Ernesto Romo, "Manifesto Shards of Glass," Manifestos and Proposals: Collaborative Projects and Manifestos (artist publication, Los Angeles, 2005). 2. See Tere Romo, "Points of Convergence: The Iconography of the Chicano Poster," in Just Another Poster? Chicano Graphic Arts in California, ed. Chon A. Noriega (Santa Barbara: University Art Museum, University of California, 2001), and Rafael Pérez-Torres, Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), especially chap. 4. 3. See Shifra Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 166. 4. Perhaps the most well-known debate about the commercial cooption of Chicano art took place between, on the one side, Malaquías Montoya and Leslie Salkowitz-Montoya, and on the other, Shifra Goldman. See Montoya and Salkowitz- Montoya, "A Critical Perspective on the State of Chicano Art," Metamorfosis 3, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1980): 3–7 and Goldman, "Response: Another Opinion on the State of Chicano Art," double issue, Metamorfosis 3, no. 2, and 4, no. 1: 2–7. 5. See Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California, ed. Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc (New York: Routledge, 2003), 9. 6. My own writing and discussion of the artists has been influenced by the design and art collaborative ADOBE LA (Artists and Designers on the Border Edge of Los Angeles), as well as the scholarship of Eric Avila, Mary Pat Brady, Rosalyn Deutsche, Norman Klein, Steve Pile, Raul Villa, and Sharon Zukin. 7. Skirting away from the loaded term globalization, I use the term transnationalism to focus on the impact of immigrant landscapes and underground or subaltern phenomena on con- temporary artists. Globalism, globalization, and the global are terms that have been bandied about freely in art discourse. I want to avoid describing the work in this show as indicative of the new global awareness or interconnectedness of the art world, which runs the risk of downplaying the critical func- tions of much of this work, in particular its criticisms of envi- ronmental racism, uneven economic development, and politi- cal erasures. As Pamela M. Lee has noted, "there is the lurk- ing suspicion shared by many longstanding art-world partici- pants that 'the Global' has simply assumed the throne formerly held by likes of the Postmodern, the Multicultural, the Simulacra, and the informe (and not unlike the operations of formless- ness, globalization's neoliberal consequences may prove thoroughly abject)." See Pamela M. Lee, "Boundary Issues: The Art World under the Sign of Globalism," in The Uncertain States of America Reader, ed. Noah Horowitz and Brian Sholis (New York and Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2006), 40–44. 8. Harry Gamboa Jr., "Urban Exile," in Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., ed. Chon A. Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 55. Originally published in La Opinión, August 19, 1984, and Artweek, October 20, 1984. 9. Of course, first-generation immigrants have long been important to American fashion; after all, Ralph Lauren, the quintessential American designer, was born Ralph Lipschitz. 10. For an overview of Gamboa's performance, video, and writing, see Noriega's "No Introduction," in Urban Exile. 11. Gamboa, quoted in Max Benavidez and Kate Vozoff, "The Wall: Image and Boundary, Chicano Art in the 1970s," in Mexican Art of the 1970s: Images of Displacement, ed. Leonard Folgarait (Nashville: Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies, 1984), 51. 12. The list of "urban existentialists" active in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and the 1980s can be expanded to include Charles (Chaz) Bojorquez, Barbara Carrasco, Diane Gamboa, Ricardo Valverde, Robert Gil de Montes, and Teddy Sandoval, among others. 13. See especially Victor Zamudio-Taylor, "Inventing Tradition, Negotiating Modernism: Chicano/a Art and the Pre- Columbian Past," in The Road to Aztlán: Art from a Mythic Homeland, exh. cat., ed. Virginia Fields and Victor Zamudio- Taylor (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001). 14. In my essay "Strangeways Here We Come," I discuss a gen- erational shift in the 1990s concurrent with the professional necessity of Masters in Fine Arts programs. The increase in the number of artists of color with records of international exhibition and the art world's "globalized" context has pro- duced a slightly more level playing field. See Recent Pasts: Art in Southern California from the '90s to Now, ed. John C. Welchman (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2006). 15. Even though Phantom Sightings purports to deconstruct past curatorial models for framing identity, a number of artists rejected the possibility that such an exhibition could escape limited readings, and thus refused the curators' invitation to participate. 16. Harry Gamboa Jr., quoted in C. Ondine Chavoya, "Social Unwest: An Interview with Harry Gamboa Jr.," Wide Angle 20, no. 3 ( July 1998): 56. 17. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, "Arte Chicano: Images of a Community," in Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals, ed. Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-Sánchez (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990). 18. Mario Ybarra Jr., "Talks about Acts," panel presentation at LA>

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