Jazz, mascots, lynching trees represented
Several memorable works in “Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art” invite closer examination; each has a story to tell:
Olga Albizu’s Radiante, a 1967 oil, may look familiar to jazz fans. Albizu, one of the first Cuban artists to embrace abstraction, created album covers for RCA and Verve records. Her painting Alla Africa was the cover of the smash bossa nova/jazz album Getz/Gilberto, which featured the classic “The Girl From Ipanema.”
The Death of Ruben Salazar by Frank Romero presents a pivotal event in Chicano history in Los Angeles. Salazar, whose writing for the Los Angeles Times documented the rise of the Chicano civil rights movement, died when he was hit by a tear-gas projectile that was fired by police into the bar where he and his associates were gathered after an anti-Vietnam War demonstration.
Romero’s painting came 15 years after Salazar’s death. “He depicted injustice as a part of Latino life,” says E. Carmen Ramos, curator of Latino art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, who organized the exhibition.
An Ofrenda for Dolores Del Rio is a shrine to the beloved actress from Mexico who was a Hollywood star in the 1920s and 1930s and an important presence in what is regarded as the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s and 1950s.
The altar was a challenge to install because of the large number of objects, says Ann Prentice Wagner, curator of drawings at the Arkansas Arts Center, who led the show’s installation. The altar, created by Amalia Mesa-Bains of Santa Cruz, Calif., is a show-stopper.
Sun Mad, Ester Hernandez’ powerful 1982 screenprint, is based on the SunMaid raisins package. She substituted the smiling pastoral image of a happy female farmworker with a Day of the Dead-inspired skeletal figure that personified the dangers facing farm workers from the pesticides, herbicides and fungicides being used in the fields.
Worker movements inspired other strong art, such as Guillermo Bejarano’s screenprint La Arma de la Gente, with its raised fist and text extolling the arm as “the symbol of struggle,” and Xavier Viramontes’ Boycott Grapes, Support the United Farm Workers Union, a 1973 offset lithograph.
Untitled, two 1978 silver gelatin print photographs of New Yorkers of Puerto Rican descent by Sophie Rivera, project a magnetic openness and radiate a dignity that will spark imaginations and curiosity. The subjects are anonymous, even to Rivera.
Crystal City, a mixed-media installation by Franco Mondini-Ruiz, pays tribute to the town where a Chicano civil rights movement and the Raza Unida party in Texas were born. The artist assembled crystal stemware, silverware, mirrors and other objects to suggest a cityscape and invite reflection (literally).
The most powerful work in this exhibition is Ken Gonzales-Day’s unsettling At daylight the miserable man was carried to an oak …, one of a series of images that he photographed, of trees where Latinos were lynched.
“His work is so moving,” Wagner says. “He is an artist and a historian … to realize this is a painful part of history of more places than the American South, of more than African-Americans. It’s always more complicated than we realize.”
— Ellis Widner