CategoriesStyles and Movements
Chicano Art
Art by Mexican Americans rooted in the Chicano civil rights movement, from community murals and posters to painting, sculpture and performance.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Chicano Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Chicano art grew out of the farmworker strikes, student walkouts and civil rights campaigns of the late 1960s, when many Mexican Americans took up the once-disparaging word Chicano as a proud political identity. Artists served the movement with posters, murals and images reclaiming the Virgin of Guadalupe, Aztec symbols and heroes of the Mexican Revolution.
Print workshops such as Self Help Graphics in East Los Angeles made collaborative screenprinting central, and Rupert García made bold posters in the Bay Area. Judith Baca led teenagers in painting the half-mile Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976–83), and residents turned the ground beneath the Coronado Bridge in San Diego into Chicano Park. The Los Angeles group Asco, including Harry Gamboa Jr., used conceptual performance against their community's invisibility. Carlos Almaraz, Frank Romero and Luis Jiménez, with his glossy fibreglass sculptures, worked on a larger scale. Much of it embraces rasquachismo, a make-do aesthetic.