This first issue on Chicano, or if you will, “Latinx” art-as it is called today, was not so much serendipitous, but the result of asking the right questions at the right time.
My interest was more in the conceptual new art and popular Chicano visual culture-photography, comics, photo-novelas, video art-than the more traditional Mexican Muralist heritage. Instead, I asked my new Latino friends, Roberto Gil de Montes, one of the founders of LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), and Eduardo Dominguez or Eddy, if they would be interested in doing studio-visits all over town if I extended my stay, and suggested that perhaps, after assessing the material we looked at, we could think about doing an entire issue of Artes Visuales on Chicano art. It soon became clear that they had their fingers on the pulse of what was happening! Before this I had started to look into dedicating a specific issue about the amazing new art coming out of Cuba-the first generation of graduates from the Instituto Superior del Arte (ISA)-this was a little before the Havana Biennial, which was begun by Yillian Yanes. This time I approached them and commented, “You know, I am not going to do a different lecture than the one you already heard, so you might get bored!” I then suggested we had dinner together in Chinatown afterwards. Two weeks later, at another venue the same two guys were again seated in the front row. Afterwards, they left before we could be introduced. At the first talk, there were two Latino guys who sat in the front row and posed some very articulate questions during the Q&A session at the end of the talk. At any rate, the NEA required that I conduct two lectures around Los Angeles. Only two people responded to this question, one was Hélio Oiticica and the other Luis Camnitzer. Of the 5 questions, the last asked what they knew or had heard in regards to Chicano art. I drew up a five-point questionnaire that I sent to a select group of Latin American curators, arts professionals, and artists living and working in Latin America, as well as some living and working in the US. In 1979, the Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art (LAICA, as it was known) invited me as an NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) Critic-in-Residency to edit a bilingual issue on Latin American art for their journal. Carla Stellweg: Yes, we were the first magazine in Latin America to focus on Chicano art. Since I learned about Artes Visuales, the bilingual quarterly magazine produced by the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) in Mexico City from 1973 to 1981-and which you were a co-founder and director of-I have been thinking about the striking similarities between our two publications. Could you first tell me about the concept of Artes Visuales? Especially about the issue dedicated to Chicano art in 1981? It seems you were the first magazine to really address that subject. We decided to dedicate the fall issue of Terremoto to Chicanx/Latinx art practices, articulating the theme around the concept of smuggling. This edition’s theme and focus was the connection between arts in Latin America and Los Angeles, as well as with the larger Latino arts communities.
Terremoto’s director Dorothée Dupuis went to meet her at her loft in New York City’s Lower East Side.ĭorothée Dupuis: Last fall Pacific Standard Time, a contemporary arts initiative of the Getty Foundation, was held as every five years in collaboration with more than a hundred art institutions, galleries, and independent spaces in the broader Los Angeles area. For 50 years, in Mexico and then New York City where she moved in the eighties, Latin Americanist curator, former museum and non-profit director, editor and writer Carla Stellweg has advocated for a hemispheric artistic dialogue which, according to her, was never a given in the Americas.
0 kommentar(er)
