 | Tropico de Nopal Gallery - Art Space http://tropicodenopal.com http://www.artresources.com http://www.latinoslacity.org |
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Galen Garwood 2005 |
Latchezar Boyadjiev |
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"Spirit of the Southwest"- Artist, writer, and workshop presenter, Shifra Stein is a firm believer in the deep connection between art and healing. Her Journaling Workshops and Creativity Classes combine expressive writing and the visual arts together in motivational presentations that help promote well being, reduce stress, and encourage creativity http://www.shifrastein.com/ |
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LOS ANGELES, California - Tropico de Nopal Gallery-Art space starts the year 2005 with an exhibition by Will Herrn III one of the most important Chicano artist and Muralist in the United States and founder and original members of ASCO and the punk musical group Los Illegals.
painful re-birth of Chicanos began with the death of Ruben Salazar at the hands of the LA County Sheriff in 1970 during the low point of the American intervention in Vietnam, inspiring a self definition of Mexican-Americans as "Chicanos", who have been unheard from since the death of the cultural symbolic revolutionary "Pachuco" in the mid 1940''s.
During this period Herron was baking Pan Dulce (Mexican Sweetbread) in the family''s small East LA bakery by day and co-founding the avant-garde Performance Art group "ASCO" (Spanish for nausea) by night concocting guerilla performances reflecting the religion, street gang, and intensive helicopter police sweeps along with other urban images that burned in his head
After nearly a decade of high profiled and controversial public ASCO performances, Herrn turned his attention away from a movement that was losing its energy and began to question the true relevancy of a theatrical style that was becoming "just another form of Radical Chic".
His new found and urgent focus was now turned to the mission of re-defining the Chicano in the coming 1980''s through another medium: music he defined as "Alternative to the alternative" and recruiting a band of civil rights activists, local street vagrants and aspiring mariachis to form what many leading historical texts and documentaries have called "the most important cultural Chicano catalysts of the 1980''s": Los Illegals.
HerrthiCa incorporates decades of re-definition and re-birthing of His "perspective as a Chicano artist" through the use of canvas, wood, metal, glass, and music.
In an era of fly by night and "upscale-pseudo-alternative-elitist (and high priced) art galleries", Herrn had decided not to exhibit any art but rather to retreat to the alley and the bakery of his youth to produce a selected work of art not tied up by the outside popular definition of "Chicano art". Until now- in this time of another birth (El Dolor Con El Pan Fino)