MEDIA RELEASE

CSUN Faculty’s Influence Felt in LACMA’s ‘Phantom Sightings’

(NORTHRIDGE, Calif., April 8, 2008) — In many ways, wrote Harry Gamboa nearly 25 years ago, Chicano culture exists as a phantom in terms of its impact. It is the responsibility of artists, he said then, to make sure the culture remains visible.

Gamboa and Sandra de la Loza, Cal State Northridge Chicana/o Studies Department faculty members, have taken that responsibility to heart, and their influence is felt in what is being billed as "the first major consideration of the legacy of Chicano art in almost two decades."

Amid the fanfare of spinoff receptions, a news conference and symposia, the "Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement" exhibition opened April 6 and will run through Sept. 1 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). A three-year tour of major museums in the U.S. and Mexico follows.

Their works are featured with that of other prominent Chicana/o artists, but de la Loza and Gamboa are the sole attractions of a "Conversation with Artists’ session set for 2 p.m. May 4 at the museum.

Gamboa, whose writings inspired the exhibition’s title, will exhibit photographs that emerged from his association with ASCO—the Spanish word for "nausea"—a conceptual-performance art group that from 1972 to 1987 engaged in street performances, photography and writing derived from its common cultural experience.

De la Loza’s "Fort Moore: Living Monument," a creative installation to which an entire room at LACMA is devoted, is an exploration of downtown Los Angeles’ Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial dedicated to the Mormon Battalion and other troops who built the fort during the Mexican-American War.

Raised during the turmoil of the 1960s, Gamboa turned to art as his means of demanding human rights.

Working with the likes of artists Patssi Valdez and Gronk, Gamboa produced images of conceptual works well known to today’s students of Chicana/o art. Six of these are shown in the LACMA exhibit, among them "First Supper after a Major Riot," in which artists have a picnic at a traffic island to "remove the negativity" from the site, earlier the scene of a police shooting.

De la Loza’s installation incorporates a video component and wall work with archival materials like maps and old photos related to the history of Fort Moore Hill. "Within the video," she said, "I conceptually destabilize the monument and thereby question the official narrative that’s been monumentalized."

A whole generation of academics and academy-trained artists has grown up to write about and practice art that grew out of the Chicana/o movement of the 1970s. In “Phantom Sightings,” the old and new converge.