Book cover reproduction of Mexican artist Genaro Álvarez’s mosaic mural commissioned by the Chicago Housing Authority 1956. Courtesy Daniel Ronan, National Public Housing Museum—mentioned in the Chicago Mexican artist section of the LACASA Chicago website.
With the work undertaken in recent years by others to establish and develop websites on Chicago Latino art, is there anything special about the new one open now and scheduled for formal launching in Pilsen November 11?
LACASA Chicago will formally launch its new website, www.lacasachicago.org at an event entitled intersecciones/intersections: Lit-Art/e Chicago Latin@, to be held at the Carlos & DomínguezFine Arts Gallery,Friday November 11, 2016 4:30-9:30 p.m. as part of El BeiSMan’s Signos y Reflexiones: Encuentro de Autorxs Latinxs en Chicago. Featuring above allComponents II-IV, The Chicago Latino Art Series (CLAS), the website is a wide-ranging compendium of materials on Chicago Mexican (CMAP), Puerto Rican (CPRAP) and other Latino (CPOLAP) artists, art organizations, publications, etc.; it also including Components V and VI, with materials on Chicago Latino literature, culture and history.
On line since late September and designed by Alex Magaña, of Hand-Made Graphics, on the basis of materials compiled by LACASA CLAS members and coordinated by LACASA director Marc Zimmerman, www.lacasachicago.org provides less developed but promising initial sections on Latino, Latin American, and Central American as well as world culture and literature. The website also features still-to-be developed components on Latino and Latin American music and sports, as well as “Latino Sexualities.”
At first glance, it is clear that the Latino art components of the www.lacasachicago.org website is still a baby, with many kinks to work out, links that don’t work or misdirect users, etc. Much work still needs to be done. However, even now sections II-IV devoted to The Chicago Latino Art Series (CLAS) comprise a comprehensive series of links to countless Chicago Latin@ artists from the 1920s to the present, representing some five years of work by René Arceo, Marta Ayala, Len Domínguez, José Gamaliel González, Olga Herrera, Jeff Huebner, Nicole Marroquín, Paul Sierra, Diana Solís, Marc Zimmerman and others,as members, consultants and friends of CLAS. The main focus of the members has been to trace the story of the Chicago Latin@ arts explosion, from 1968 through the 1980s, with some emphasis given to work prior and subsequent to this period, through a series of digitalized audio interviews of or about key pioneer artists, as well as a growing “bank” of art work photos and documents which would supplement the interviews. The website note indicates that neither the interviews nor the “banks” will be available for some time; and so the group came the decision to launch what they had as a provisional project result that provides information about key topics mentioned, while featuring links mainly to materials currently available offline about the artists interviewed and countless others taken into consideration in the course of project development.
The Chicago Mexican Arts Project (CMAP) section of the website presents recent LACASA publications on the theme, provides a list of online overview essays and abstracts, provides information on Chicago Mexican and Mexican-related arts and cultural organizations past and present. It then turns to its main task: research on individual Mexican and Chicano artists with ‘Chicago connections.’ Most notably, CMAP has turned up listings for the first small wave of Louisiana and Texas-based Mexican American artists who came to that art mecca, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SIAC), in the 1920s; it points to a first muralist and architect, Adrián Lozano, as well as the Jane Addams Hull House potters, one of whom Jesús Torres, had a subsequent career as an art designer working with Chicago’s Edgar Miller and on his own, up until his death in 1950. CMAP then points to other artists who appeared in the 1950s and 60s—most notably Luis Ortíz-Mendoza, a Guanajuato-born artist who became a circus clown and acrobat, before serving in WWII, using his G.I. Bill to attend the SAIC, and then becoming perhaps the first professional Mexican artist to emerge in the city—a figure well known for his prolific painting of surreal faces and only recently re-discovered by workers at Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art.
The next achievement of CMAP is its listings for pioneer Mexican public and studio artists who emerged from 1968 to the late 1980s, as a key cultural dimension of what the group designates as the Chicago Latino Explosion,” a period of growing community activism in an effort to overturn the Daley Machine Pecking Order in a struggle for rights and empowerment.
Peace, Metaphysics by Mario Castillo
The treatment of this period includes Mario Castillo’s Metafísica and Wall of Brotherhood, highly symbolic works appearing in 1968 and 1969, and considered by many in CMAP and elsewhere (is it possibly true?) as the first outdoor murals of the Chicano movement and of Mexican Chicago; the website also presents us with Feliítas Núñez, a San Diego Chicana, who came to Chicago in 1969 and painted a mural on the northside Church headquarters of the Young Lords, including three Puerto Rican iconic figures but also an image of “La Adelita” in what may have been the first Mexican woman’s mural in the city and the U.S. as a whole (apparently CMAP has an extensive interview with the artist, who left soon after painting her mural and never returned again).
For the 1970s and 80s, the website presents a panoply of artists who CMAP considers as the city’s “pioneer Mexican artists.” Among them were two artists interviewed by CMAP, Errol Ortiz, the son of Ortiz-Mendoza, whose work was and is associated with the SAIC Imaginists group, and Dan Ramirez, whose minimalist textures have brought him international attention. Perhaps most central to the CMPAP project are the larger group of pioneers, who continued Castillo’s work in what began primarily as a public art movement. CMAP’s listings for these artists are divided between (1) those interviewed by the CMAP team, and (2) those who have not yet or (because of death or disappearance from the internet, etc.) never will be interviewed by the group. Among the former are virtually all the artists, including Castillo, whom we recognize as prime players of the years in question: Ricardo Alonzo, Carlos Cortez, Aurelio Díaz, José Gamaliel González, José Guerrero, Jimmie Longoria, Francisco and Vicente Mendoza, Óscar Moya, Ray Patlán, Marcos Raya, Alejandro Romero, Sal Vega, Román Villarreal—and more recent figures emerging in the 1980s: René Arceo, Héctor Duarte, Nicolás de Jesús, Dulce Pulido, Robert Valadez, etc. CMAP then proceeds to provide links to several more recent artists from the 1990s to the present, and finally a list finally of those artists CMAP has not yet research.
Also of great importance is the work of CPRAP, Chicago Puerto Rican Artists Project. After providing materials about Puerto Rican Arts organizations, this website component presents links to two initial artists who pre-date the Chicago Rican explosion following the so-called “riot” of 1966. Humacao, PR artist Rufino Silva graduated from the SAIC; and after some GI-Bill funded years at a major art school outside of Paris, became the first Latin American to hold a full-time tenured position at the SAIC from the 1959 until his retirement in 1982. CPRAP located pictures of Silva’s two exhibitions in Puerto Rico, as well as photos of a painting and prints housed by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña and family members. CPRAP has interviewed all key family members with respect to María Luisa Penne Rullán de Castillo also attended the SAIC and painted several works before returning to the island to found and develop art programs at the Universidad Interamericana and la Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayaguez. On her death in 2005, she left a broad body of work, including some which she painted during her Chicago stay and which the website developers intend to put on line when that phase of their project continues.
In the part of CPRAP devoted to pioneer artists, we find links to works by key artists who emerged in the 1970s, some of whom like Oscar Martínez and Gamaliel Ramírez, have been interviewed and others, like Mario Galán, have not been interviewed. A special figure in this regard is Samuel Sánchez, a significant member of the Tufiño school of custumbristic painting who lived in Chicago from 1980 until his demise in 2012, leaving some 500 art pieces which he exhibited almost exclusively in Puerto Rico, with very little contact with the local Boricua community and which are currently in the hands of a granddaughter whom he raised in Hyde Park. CPRAC also provides links to several other Puerto Rican artists emerging in the 1980s—Jorge Féliz, Raúl Ortiz Bonilla, Carlos Rolón/Dzineand Bibiana Suárez among others; it then presents links to non-Chicago Rican artists from New York and the island who have widely exhibited and otherwise participated locally—among them, former POW Elizam Escobar and Antonio Martorell (both interviewed), plus a large number of recently emerging artists who have come to Chicago as part of the current out-migration of thousands due to the island’s economic crisis, and finally several non-Puerto Rican artists like John Weber, Héctor Duarte, and Felicitas Núñez who have contributed to the developing Chicago Rican art scene.
A third CLAS component, CPOLAP, The Chicago Pan or Other Latin@ Artists Project, presents some framing materials, but focuses on the many Chicago artists from different Latin American countries, and provides links to several non-Mexican or Latino artists (German, Jewish, Afro-American, etc.) who played a part in developing Mexican and Latino-themed work in Chicago. Among the Latin Americans, CPOLAP has uncovered “precursor artists” like Santiago Martínez Delgado from Colombia, who painted some of the first Latin American murals in the city; then there is Publio Amable, otherwise known as Raúl Martínez González, a Cuban artist who developed in the city during the Batista period and then returned to Cuba to contribute to the cultural life of the emergent Cuban world. While Mirtes Zwierzynski has for some time been perhaps the most distinguished Brazilian artist in the city, CPOLAP shows the many new artists from Brazil as well as Central and all parts of South America who have been playing key roles in recent years.
Overall these descriptions of three components of the LACASA CLAS project presented above provide a good idea of what that project and its subsequent development (involving the González art photo collection and other important image banks, but the recordings above all) might provide in developing research and knowledge with respect to important aspects of Latino Chicago. The other components on Chicago Latino history and literature are also of great value, including countless articles on Chicago Chicano writing; and still other components on Global, Latin and Central American cultural studies, sports, music and sexualities need further development, but are already of great importance. The three CLAS components draw considerably on Olga U. Herrera, Toward the preservation of a heritage: Latin American and Latino Art in the Midwestern United States. (University of Notre Dame. Institute for Latino Studies, 2008)—https://latinostudies.nd.edu/assets/94040/heritageweb.pdf. The project is not to be confused with and indeed complements other, excellent projects, to which CLAS participants have in fact contributed and which the LACASA website highly recommends to interested researchers:
(1) The Midwest Latino Artists Archives of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies—https://latinostudies.nd.edu/library-archives/collections/; https://latinostudies.nd.edu/library-archives/oral-history-interviews.
(2) The Chicago Latin@ art materials in The ICAA Documents of 20th-century Latin American and Latino Art digital archive of the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston: http://icaadocs.mfah.org/icaadocs/.
(3) Two brand new resources developed by the Inter-University Program for Latino Research with the Smithsonian Latino Center: first, The Chicago Virtual Gallery, a superb site for students wishing to explore highlights of the Chicago Latino art world-www.latino,si.edu/LatinoArtNow/LAN-ChiVG; and then The Chicago Latino ArTchive: https://iuplr.uic.edu/iuplr/chicagolatinoartchive (Both sites were launched at a recent reception at the NMMA on October 6).
LACASA CLAS members say that those viewing the website should feel free to explore it and send comments, suggestions for modifications and additions, etc. to Face Book La Casa Chicago. As CLAS members put it, “The improvement of the website depends very much on its readers; “¡LACASA es su casa!”
Those wishing to attend the website launch at the intersecciones/intersections event on 11/11/16 may also be able to participate in other related launches to be held at the same: first, a Marc Zimmerman’s presentation of his novel or “semi-novela,” Martín and Marvin: A Chicago Jewish Mexican, His Friends and their Latin Worlds; the José González Chicago and Midwest Photo & Poster Collections; and a new CD honoring the late Chicago Mexican artist José Guerrero. The event will be also be a farewell to the Carlos and Domínguez Gallery, which has served as a home to the CMAP group since it began the work leading to the website and the other by-products of the ongoing website project.
Collage of mural images by José Gamaliel González
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William Simbolov is author of countless journal articles on socio-political and specifically Latin@ and Latin American themes.