March 17, 2004

Seminar Series, Chicana/o Visual Culture, To Begin April 2 At UCSD

By Jan Jennings

Chicana/o Visual Culture, a five-part seminar series on Chicana/o art, will be held beginning April 2 and continuing on consecutive Fridays from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. through April 30 in the Women’s Center at the University of California, San Diego. All events are free and open to the public.

The seminar series is part of month-long activities at UCSD during April celebrating the life and accomplishments of Chicano civil rights leader César E. Chávez whose birthday is March 31.

The April 2 seminar kick-off will include the opening of an art exhibition, the debut of the Chicana/o Art of San Diego Catalog, and an Artists of San Diego Roundtable. The catalog is a record of local Chicana/o artists compiled by UCSD students in the undergraduate course, Chicana/o Visual Culture, taught by Olga Vasquez, an associate professor in the UCSD Department of Communication. The art exhibition will include the work of artists featured in the catalog and will be on view through April in the Women’s Center and in the Department of Communication.

“For students to understand the theorizing of an art that sought to make visible, empower, and historize a community, I sent them out into the community to speak directly to artists whose creations spoke to the sentiments enscribed in the discourse of Chicana/o art and the Chicana/o movement,” Vasquez said. “We discussed their interviews in class and brought in artists and scholars,” including Mario Torero, Salvador Torres, and Alicia Arrizón, to speak.

In compiling the catalog, the students “learned first hand the issues surrounding exhibition, promotion, and dissemination of Chicana/o art,” she added.

Thirteen local artists will be featured in the art exhibition, 10 of whom will participate in the Artists of San Diego Roundtable, a discussion of Chicana/o art, its goals, form, impact, and history.

On April 9, Roberto Tejada, assistant professor of art history, theory, and criticism in the UCSD Visual Arts Department, will speak on Loud Image: The Visual Tactics of Luis Gispert. Cuban-American artist Gispert works in photography, video, and three-dimensional constructions to activate a system of “loud” images – cheerleaders, body-shop machinery, speaker boxes. With his art he asks the question: “What’s at stake in this image-making, and what does it have to say about U.S. American visual culture, Latina/o representations, and the international art world in the age of multiculturalism?”

A photography historian and curator, Tejada researches 20th century image-making from the perspective of interdisciplinary discourses in Latin American and Latina/o studies, cultural and critical theory, literary studies, art history, and visual culture analysis.

Guisela Latorre, assistant professor of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will speak April 16 on Male Crisis: Masculinity, Power and Chicana/o Art. Latorre specializes in modern and contemporary Chicana/o and Latin American art.

“This critique of masculinity corresponds to a period in Chicana/o history when artists become increasingly self-reflective about their own relationship to the activism and ideals of the Chicano Movement,” said Latorre. She will discuss images such as Judy Baca’s representation of the Zoot Suit riots of 1981, Chicano artist Rubén Trejo’s irreverent and mocking series of the 1980s, and the recent work of queer male Chicano artists Alex Donis and Tino Rodríguez. The goal is to seek understanding of “the transformations and transmutations that Chicana/o artistic development has undergone from the early 1970s to the turn of the millennium.”

Alicia Arrizón, associate professor of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Riverside, will speak April 23 on Performing Space and the ‘Native’ Body in Chicana/o Art. She will discuss the work of Chicana artists and intellectuals dealing with the idea of mestizaje and the ways it has influenced transculturation and interculturalism.

Arrizón is the author of Latina Performance and co-author of Latinas on Stage. Her academic interests are in contemporary cultural and performance studies, with a strong commitment to the interdisciplinary approach to the study of race and ethnicity and their interchange with gender, class, and sexuality.

The April 30 seminar finale will feature Tomás Ybarra Frausto, associate director for Creativity and Culture at the Rockefeller Foundation. He will speak on The (Re) Generation of Chicana/o Art.

Frausto said he will juxtapose “a group of Chicana/o artists from the Civil Rights (El Movimiento) period with selected artists from the present generation. The aesthetic, social and political programs of both cohorts [will be] examined within the context of multi-cultural America … As Latinos become the largest ethnic minority in the country, their imaginations are envisioning a new millennial America.”

Prior to joining the Rockefeller Foundation, Frausto was a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University. He has served as the chair of the Mexican Museum in San Francisco and on the Smithsonian Council, and has written and published extensively on Latin American and U.S./Latino cultural issues.

For further information on the seminar series call (858) 534-6862 or visit UCSD’s César E. Chávez website at http://blink.ucsd.edu/go/chavez.

Media Contact: Pat JaCoby, (858) 534-7404 or Jan Jennings, (858) 822-1684