Barbara Carrasco was starving. She had just dropped off her husband, the artist Harry Gamboa Jr., at LAX and driven cross-town to meet me at their old hangout, Phillipe’s. As we sat down with French dip sandwiches and talked about her life and work I realized that underneath the easy laugh and unpretentious manner there was an incredible strength that had allowed her to travel from the projects of Mar Vista, to the halls of UCLA, to battle the sexism and racism from both the Anglo and Chicano communities, to work with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, to get her MFA at Cal Arts and to beat cancer. [Read more…]
Carlos Almaraz, Playing With Fire
Part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA
at The Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner
Pacific Standard Time/LA/LA (Los Angeles, Latin America) is the second installment of a widespread series of exhibitions sponsored by The Getty. This incarnation involves over 70 institutions (art galleries, museums, and other cultural venues) from all over Southern California, including Palm Springs, to showcase Chicano and Latino art — ancient through contemporary.
As part of PST/LA/LA, The Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art (LACMA) shows a survey of painting from the prolific and prodigiously gifted Carlos Almaraz, who died too young of AIDS in 1989. From 1973-83, Almaraz was part of a Chicano (though that term was new) Collective, called Los Four, which included Frank Romero, Gilbert Magu Lujan, and Roberto de la Rocha. They worked together, painted and sculpted many of the same images (cars, cacti, dogs, chairs, flames) as they developed a Chicano lexicon of imagery. They are all being recognized anew. Frank Romero just had an outstanding retrospective at MOLAA last spring and Gilbert Magu Lujan will have a huge retrospective (over 200 works) at UCI this fall. The fourth member, Roberto de la Rocha, unfortunately destroyed all his works, went into seclusion for 20 years and is just now rejoining the Los Angeles artistic community. [Read more…]
Frank Romero’s Enchanting Dreamland
The Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream”
Edgar Allan Poe
“Dreamland,” Frank Romero’s sprawling (like Los Angeles itself), exuberant retrospective at the Museum of Latin American Art, is jam-packed with over 200 paintings, monotypes, mixed-media low-relief wall pieces and jazzy neon sculptures. Romero, a founding member of Los Four in 1974 with Carlos Almaraz, Gilbert “Magu” Lujan and Roberto “Berto” de la Roche, came of age artistically in that heady time when identity politics was being shaped. Groups underrepresented in the art world at that time -women, gays and lesbians, Chicanos – all separated into their respective tribes to develop and nurture art that both described and celebrated their unique experience. [Read more…]