Rita Gonzalez is an American curator, author and media artist. She is the head of the contemporary art department at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), an institution she has worked at since 2004. [1] Many of her curatorial projects involve under-recognized Latinx and Latin American artists. [2]
Gonzalez grew up in Whittier, California, studied at University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and completed P.h.D. coursework in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) film, television and digital media program on topics related to representation of Chicano art in contemporary art discourse. [3] [4]
In 2018, Gonzalez participated in the Center for Curatorial Leadership program, with Anne Pasternak as her mentor at the Brooklyn Museum.
From 1997 to 1999, Gonzalez served as the Lila Wallace Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. [5]
Gonzalez's curatorial oeuvre at LACMA includes Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement (2008), Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987 (2011), L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists (2016), and A Universal History of Infamy (2018), a collaboration with José Luis Blondet and Pilar Tompkins Rivas. [6]
In 2017, Gonzalez served on the jury for the stand prizes of Frieze Art Fair. [7]
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits.
Los Four was a Chicano artist collective active based in Los Angeles, California. The group was instrumental in bringing the Chicano art movement to the attention of the mainstream art world.
Yolanda Margarita López was an American painter, printmaker, educator, and film producer. She was known for her Chicana feminist works focusing on the experiences of Mexican-American women, often challenging the ethnic stereotypes associated with them. Lopez was recognized for her series of paintings which re-imagined the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Her work is held in several public collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Jason Villegas is a San Francisco based contemporary artist. He has exhibited across the United States and internationally. Villegas' work includes sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, textile, video and performance, exploring concepts such as globalism, evolution, sexuality, cosmology, and consumerism. Motifs in Villegas' artworks include fashion logos, animal hybrids, weaponry, sales banners, clothing piles, anuses, cosmic debris, taxidermy, bear men, amorphous beasts, religious iconography, and party scenarios.
Judithe Hernández is an American artist and educator, she is known as a muralist, pastel artist, and painter. She is a pioneer of the Chicano art movement and a former member of the art collective Los Four. She is based in Los Angeles, California and previously lived in Chicago.
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.
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Jennifer Chihae Moon is a conceptual artist and life-artist living in Los Angeles. She was born in Lafayette, Indiana and completed her bachelor's degree at UCLA and master's degree at Art Center College of Design.
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Christine Y. Kim is an American curator of contemporary art. She is currently the Britton Family Curator-at-Large at Tate. Prior to this post, Kim held the position of Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Before her appointment at LACMA in 2009, she was Associate Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem in New York. She is best known for her exhibitions of and publications on artists of color, diasporic and marginalized discourses, and 21st-century technology and artistic practices.
Carolyn Castaño, is an American visual artist. She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors (2013), the California Community Foundation Getty Fellow Mid-Career Grant (2011), and the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Grant (2011). She is an Assistant Professor, Drawing & Painting, at Long Beach City College.
Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA is an art event celebrating Latin American art in over 70 museums and galleries in Los Angeles and Southern California held from September 2017 through early 2018.
Franklin Sirmans is an American art critic, editor, writer, curator and has been the director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) since October 2015. His initiatives there include ensuring that PAMM's art program reflects the community in Miami and securing donations. In his first six months at PAMM, he managed to secure the largest donation of works in the museum's short history, over a hundred pieces of art were donated by Design District developer Craig Robins.
Rujeko Hockley is a New York–based US curator. Hockley is currently the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Nicola López (1975) is an American contemporary artist known for her drawings, prints, installations and collages.
Elizabeth Sisco is an artist active in the Chicano art movement.
Chon A. Noriega is an American art historian, media scholar, and curator. Noriega is professor of cinema and media studies at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. He was also the director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) from 2002 to 2021.
Joe Ray is an American artist based in Los Angeles. His work has moved between abstraction and representation and mediums including painting, sculpture, performance art and photography. He began his career in the early 1960s and belonged to several notable art communities in Los Angeles, including the Light and Space movement; early cast-resin sculptors, including Larry Bell; and the influential 1970s African-American collective, Studio Z, of which he was a founding member with artists such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi and Houston Conwill. Critic Catherine Wagley described Ray as "an artist far more committed to understanding all kinds of light and space than to any specific material or strategy"—a tendency that she and others have suggested led to his being under-recognized.
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