Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This document is a letter addressed to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and signed by Artists of the Fifth Sun Exhibition. It was written in response to the review of the exhibition The Fifth Sun: Contemporary/Traditional Chicano and Latino [...]

In this document, Amalia Mesa-Bains details the development of the Galería de la Raza [Gallery of the People], an important San Francisco cultural institution established in 1970 in the midst of the Chicano Movement. Mesa-Bains describes the ways in [...]

This document is an essay by Amalia Mesa-Bains in which she argues in favor of developing a new critical language for the evaluation of Chicano and Latino art rooted in the formative experiences of the artists throughout the communities from which [...]

The essay is a brief artist statement in which Amalia Mesa-Bains recounts her beginnings as an altar-maker at the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco in the late 1970s and her subsequent transition from constructing personal altars to public [...]

This document by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto details the founding of La Galería de la Raza in San Francisco Mission District in July 1970. Conceived as a space for the development and promotion of Chicana/o visual artists, the Galería also functioned as [...]

Written by art historian Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, this document represents a chronology of important social and cultural developments in Chicano art. Beginning in 1959 with an exhibition organized around the MAPA (Mexican American Political Association [...]

In this interview conducted by Mexican performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Chicano artist Rupert Garcia discusses his perspective on Chicano art, particularly its relation to mainstream institutions and current theoretical trends. [...]

As the curator of Another Life Up Inside Her Head (1995), an exhibition of seventeen emerging Chicana/Latina artists, Amalia Mesa-Bains considers the precedents for their work, as well as the contemporary contexts in which it has been produced. She [...]

In this essay, Harry Gamboa, Jr. profiles the Chicano artist collective, ASCO, to which he belonged. He highlights Walking Mural (1972) as the performance that first introduced the group to the Chicano community. He describes how ASCO followed this [...]

In this essay, Tere Romo explores the syncretic nature of Chicano spirituality manifested in Chicano art and rooted in the initial encounter between indigenous American cultures and Europe, as well as in the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. [...]

In this essay, artist and author Rupert Garcia focuses on two related modes of Chicano art: the mural and the poster. Garcia maintains that Chicano-Latino mural and poster art were both born out of the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Both [...]

This document is an interview between artist and guest curator, Ralph Maradiaga and René Yañez, both co-directors of Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco, California. Yañez speaks about the beginnings of the Chicano Art Movement and the growth the [...]