Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a Mexican/Chicano performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. Gómez-Peña has created work in multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, photography and installation art. His fifteen books include essays, experimental poetry, performance scripts, photographs and chronicles in both English, Spanish and Spanglish. He is a founding member of the pioneering art collective Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (1985-1992) and artistic director of the performance art troupe La Pocha Nostra.
José Esteban Muñoz was a Cuban American academic in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory.
Harry Gamboa Jr. is an American Chicano essayist, photographer, director, and performance artist. He was a founding member of the influential Chicano performance art collective ASCO.
Suzanne Lacy is an American artist, educator, writer, and professor at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. She has worked in a variety of media, including installation, video, performance, public art, photography, and art books, in which she focuses on "social themes and urban issues." She served in the education cabinet of Jerry Brown, then mayor of Oakland, California, and as arts commissioner for the city. She designed multiple educational programs beginning with her role as performance faculty at the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles.
Coco Fusco is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work has been exhibited and published internationally. Fusco's work explores gender, identity, race, and power through performance, video, interactive installations, and critical writing.
Jesusa Rodríguez is a Mexican theater director, actress, performance artist, social activist, elected Senator of the Morena party and an active promoter of the use of marihuana and other drugs. She is an active representative of the LGBT community.
Luis Alfaro is a Chicano performance artist, writer, theater director, and social activist.
Patssi Valdez is an American Chicana artist. She is a founding member of the art collective Asco. Valdez's work represents some of the finest Chicana avant-garde expressionism which includes but not limited to painting, sculpture and fashion design. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Willie F. Herrón III is an American Chicano muralist, performance artist and commercial artist. Herrón was also one of the founding members of ASCO, the East Los Angeles based Chicano artists collective .
Asco was an East Los Angeles based Chicano artist collective, active from 1972 to 1987. Asco adopted its name as a collective in 1973, making a direct reference to the word's significance in Spanish ("asco"), which is disgust or repulsion. Asco's work throughout 1970s and 1980s responded specifically to socioeconomic and political problems surrounding the Chicano community in the United States, as well the Vietnam War. Harry Gamboa Jr., Glugio "Gronk" Nicandro, Willie F. Herrón III and Patssi Valdez form the core members of the group.
Laura Aguilar was an American photographer. She was born with auditory dyslexia and attributed her start in photography to her brother, who showed her how to develop in dark rooms. She was mostly self-taught, although she took some photography courses at East Los Angeles College, where her second solo exhibition, Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, was held. Aguilar used visual art to bring forth marginalized identities, especially within the LA Queer scene and Latinx communities. Before the term Intersectionality was used commonly, Aguilar captured the largely invisible identities of large bodied, queer, working-class, brown people in the form of portraits. Often using her naked body as a subject, she used photography to empower herself and her inner struggles to reclaim her own identity as "Laura" – a lesbian, fat, disabled, and brown person. Although work on Chicana/os is limited, Aguilar has become an essential figure in Chicano art history and is often regarded as an early "pioneer of intersectional feminism" for her outright and uncensored work. Some of her most well-known works are Three Eagles Flying, The Plush Pony Series, and Nature Self Portraits. Aguilar has been noted for her collaboration with cultural scholars such as Yvonne Yarbo-Berjano and receiving inspiration from other artists like Judy Dater. She was well known for her portraits, mostly of herself, and also focused upon people in marginalized communities, including LGBT and Latino subjects, self-love, and social stigma of obesity.
Maris Bustamante is a Mexican transdisciplinary artist. She has presented her work in 21 solo exhibitions and over 400 group shows in Mexico and internationally. She has conceived, written, produced and executed more than 250 performances, installations, environments and two big “contraespectáculos” (anti-shows). Bustamante has also presented performance art pieces through television broadcasts, which she called "social performances" involving the non-arts public. She also designs sets, costumes, and props for theatre, television, and cinema. Bustamante is a respected teacher and for more than thirty years has been a professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana de la Unidad Azcapotzalco. Since the 1990s she has maintained a robust career as a researcher and writer on themes related to conceptual art, performance, and participation. Her writing has appeared in seminal books and exhibition catalogues, including Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (2000), Arte [no es] Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000 (2008)', and Asco: Elite of the Obscure, 1972–1987(2011).
Celia Álvarez Muñoz is a Chicana mixed-media conceptual artist and photographer based in Arlington, Texas.
The Anonymous Was A Woman Award is a grant program for women artists who are over 40 years of age, in part to counter sexism in the art world. It began in 1996 in direct response to the National Endowment for the Arts' decision to stop funding individual artists.
The Couple in a Cage: Two Amerindians Visit the West was a 1992–93 performance art piece by artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña for their exhibition The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West which toured five countries and was performed in nine different locations. First performed in honor of the quincentenary anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival to the Americas, the work sought to make visible the history of abuse, captivity and exploitation of indigenous peoples. Their inspiration drew heavily upon the history of othering, the human zoo, and life stories of historical figures such as Ota Benga and Sarah Baartman—beginning with the kidnapping of Arawak Indian by Columbus and his men to be displayed in the Spanish Court.
Antonieta Sosa is a Venezuelan performance artist born in New York. Her notable performance works include Conversación con agua tibia and Del Cuerpo al Vacío. Her early work includes abstract art pieces such as Visual Chess (1965), which is in the Museum of Modern Art's online collection.
Kambui Olujimi is a New York-based visual artist working across disciplines using installation, photography, performance, tapestry, works on paper, video, large sculptures and painting. His artwork reflects on public discourse, mythology, historical narrative, social practices, exchange, mediated cultures, resilience and autonomy.
Isabel Castro, also known as Isabel Castro-Melendez, is a Mexican American artist born in Mexico City. She was raised and still resides in Los Angeles, California. Aside from being an artist, Castro's career includes curatorial work, education, journalism and photography.
Ariana Brown is an American spoken word poet. In 2014, she was part of a winning team at the national collegiate poetry slam. Ariana Brown has won the “Best Poet” award twice at the same event.
OCDChinatown is a contemporary space for sound, image, object, movement and thought, located in New York City in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan. It was established in 2018 by Liutas van Hook.
