PR for People Monthly January 2018 | Page 8

On a walk through the L.A. County Museum of Art one day back in 1972, artist Harry Gamboa, Jr. noticed there were no works by Chicano or Mexican artists in the collection. He tracked down a curator and confronted him, only to be told that Chicanos don’t make art, they join gangs. Gamboa took the news back to East L.A. and his friends Willie Herron III, Gronk (Guglio Nicandro) and Patssi Valdez, who formed the cutting-edge Chicano-based arts collective, Asco. Their response was “Spray Paint LACMA,” a photo of Valdez standing next to their names spray painted on the building. By signing the museum, they were claiming its entire inventory as Chicano art.

Today, LACMA and roughly 70 other art institutions across Southern California are brimming with works by Latino artists as part of the groundbreaking Getty-led initiative, “PST: LA/LA.” Ironically it includes numerous works by Asco members.

“The thing with Asco, we came out of a generation that had a political notion of the way the world was. It’s taken different shapes and different forms, but there’s a presence there,” Gronk tells PR for People about the group, whose name is Spanish for “nausea” or “disgust.” One target of that disgust was the disproportionate number of Chicanos coming back from Vietnam in body bags.

East L.A.’s Garfield High, a school that experienced walkouts in 1968 over unequal conditions, is one institution Asco members have in common, but a sturdier bond was forged working on Regeneracion, a Chicano art culture and literary journal edited by Gamboa with the others on staff. It became a hothouse for ideas such as “Stations of the Cross,” their 1971 Christmas Eve Posada for which they painted their faces and bore a 15-foot cross through the neighborhood to a local army recruiter, where they left it in protest of the war.

“First Supper (After a Major Riot)” had the group in death masks and top hats seated at a dinner table set with food on a traffic island on Whittier Boulevard, the site of a police shooting during a riot with anti-war protesters. “For us, experiment was a part of our growing up and trying to do things. But also being young, physically, we were using our bodies in many ways to create things,” Gronk explains, with Valdez adding, “The other thing was our budget, which was zero. So we used things that were readily accessible. What was interesting about being limited with your resources is it makes you more inventive.”

Arte Povera was an obvious Asco influence, but so was a layered combination of identity and Dadaist elements creating ephemeral artworks that defied definition. “I always considered myself the Roger Corman of the art arena,” says Gronk, referring to the king of B-movies. “So everything comes in under budget with desperation.”

From Los Angeles Chicano Artists From the Edge

by Jordan Riefe