Natalie Sada – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Mon, 06 Nov 2017 20:28:53 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-DailyIcon-CardinalRed.png?w=32 Natalie Sada – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Cary Cordova on the underrepresentation of Latinos in art https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/05/cary-cordova-on-the-underrepresentation-of-latinos-in-art/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/11/05/cary-cordova-on-the-underrepresentation-of-latinos-in-art/#respond Mon, 06 Nov 2017 04:32:00 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1132470 Latino culture and California culture sometimes seem synonymous in the way that the two have fused to create dynamic and rich social settings around the state. Approximately one third of California residents speak Spanish as their first language at home. Obviously, the contributions of Latino culture can be seen by just observing with the naked […]

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Cary Cordova on the underrepresentation of Latinos in art
Artist Cary Cordova. (Courtesy of The San Francisco Chronicle)

Latino culture and California culture sometimes seem synonymous in the way that the two have fused to create dynamic and rich social settings around the state. Approximately one third of California residents speak Spanish as their first language at home. Obviously, the contributions of Latino culture can be seen by just observing with the naked eye. Why, however, do we not see the same representation of Latinos within artistic culture? Cary Cordova, associate professor of American History at the University of Texas at Austin, came to speak Tuesday at the second installment of the American Studies Art and Social Criticism Series. Cordova – an archivist, curator and former oral historian of the Smithsonian – is an outspoken critic of the underrepresentation of Latinos in the art world. Cordova’s newest work, “The Heart of the Mission,” traces her roots in the city of San Francisco and the role that the city has played in developing and displaying the work of groundbreaking Latino and Latina artists.

Cordova acknowledges the vast breadth and diversity of Latino and Latina work within the San Francisco Mission District, while also finding frustration with the lack of acknowledgement and representation within the art world at large. Throughout her speech Cordova drilled home a singular point: despite how important and groundbreaking the artistic work of Latinos in the Mission District has been, the San Francisco art world, and rather, the artistic community at large, has been frustratingly slow to desegregate and acknowledge the validity and accomplishments of the Latino artistic community.

Cordova opened her talk by reading from a 1973 editorial piece from The New York Times. Journalist Robert Hughes had written an op-ed about “vapid curation” of museums, in which he argues that museums are including questionable art simply for the sake of inclusion. The article is titled “And What About the Quota for Gay Militant Chicano Artists?” Hughes essentially dismisses Chicano and other minority art as illegitimate, claiming it is “noise” obscuring true and pure intellectual art. Cordova used this piece to frame her argument that the art world holds a longstanding contempt for non-western and minority artists. San Francisco, a city of diversity and opportunity, regularly excludes minority artists from artistic communities by not presenting or seeking out their work or including them in exhibitions, and thus cuts them off from the benefits and opportunities these collectives hold. Despite the roadblocks of Bay Area artistic politics and prejudice, Latino artists found their home within the Mission District.

In a city like San Francisco, filled with counter culture and intellectualism, it can be difficult to pinpoint an artistic center. For the past few decades, Latinos have created their own center within the Mission District. Latinos were able to negotiate their own artistic politics by building publishing collectives, theatrical areas, galleries and spaces of their own. They re-scripted popular images for their own critiques and started movements for their culture. The most famous of these museums is Galleria de la Raza, founded by the Chicano movement in 1970 as a place for Latino artist to display their own work on their own terms.

As Cordova emphatically described the need for recognition of this flourishing of artistic creativity, she remarked critically on the artistic world’s ignorance of Latino contributions and art. In one story she told, a Latino artist walked around the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. The artist asked why they were no portraits of Mexican Americans in the gallery, to which a docent replied, “We don’t show portraits of foreigners.”

Many pivotal works of art have come from Latino artists. Rupert Garcia’s “Down With Whiteness,” a work almost unanimously praised by San Francisco art critics for its powerful imagery and impact, faced many barriers in being shown in museums that focused on traditional Western works. Eventually, Garcia’s work was shown along with disclaimers such as “These works are the opinions of the artist. They do not in any way reflect the opinions held by the institution of this museum and its staff.”

As Latinos faced this kind of pushback for their political work, a group of Latino employees of the Smithsonian wrote a blunt letter known as “Willful Neglect.” The letter detailed the ways in which Latinos have contributed to American art and the ways in which they are excluded from staff of museums and curatorial governance. Cordova agreed that exclusion of Latinos from museums is a systemic problem: even as diversity and equal opportunity initiatives present themselves more often in museums, boards of museums that have actual governance and power remain segregated and homogeneous.

At the end of her talk Cordova paused, choosing her words carefully. “At its essence,” she said, “the art world has not reckoned with Latino culture in an appropriate way.” In light of DACA, the proposal of Trump’s wall, and the horrific natural disasters wreaking havoc on Puerto Rico, it is more important than ever to acknowledge the validity and contributions that Latino artists have given to the art world. Galleries such as Galleria De La Raza gave way to burgeoning movements that have changed artistic history. The Mission District is a pivotal center of counterculture and artistic development that is largely ignored in the artistic community as a whole. As much as we feel that we have moved away from invalidating others’ perspectives and art, we find ourselves at a moment that feels a lot like Robert Hughes’s 1973 editorial.

Cordova finished on a cynical note. “We’d like to believe that history is a narrative of progress,” Cordova said. “As much as we want it to be, and as much as we may delude ourselves into thinking it is, it simply is not.”

Contact Natalie Sada at nsada ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Harry Gamboa Jr.’s performance art is impactful as ever in ‘Vital Signs’ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/24/harry-gamboa-jr-s-performance-art-is-impactful-as-ever-in-vital-signs/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/24/harry-gamboa-jr-s-performance-art-is-impactful-as-ever-in-vital-signs/#respond Tue, 24 Oct 2017 08:00:55 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1131669 “Vital Signs,” a new performance art series curated by the acclaimed transgender performance artist Cassils, made its debut this Thursday with the work of performance artist and photographer Harry Gamboa Jr. A recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, Cassils holds multiple accolades for their performance art that explores femininity, gender roles and objectification of the […]

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Harry Gamboa Jr.’s performance art is impactful as ever in 'Vital Signs'
Harry Gamboa Jr. at the 6th Street Bridge in Los Angeles. (Courtesy of the LA Times)

“Vital Signs,” a new performance art series curated by the acclaimed transgender performance artist Cassils, made its debut this Thursday with the work of performance artist and photographer Harry Gamboa Jr. A recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, Cassils holds multiple accolades for their performance art that explores femininity, gender roles and objectification of the female figure. In a time when performance art is being thrown aside as excessively pretentious and self-indulgent, the work of Cassils reminds us of what good performance art really is: captivating, powerful and most importantly incredibly self-aware. Gamboa, a Chicano artist based out of Los Angeles, has focused his career on bringing awareness to issues such as fascism, the threats and issues surrounding urbanization and the repression and underrepresentation of Chicano culture. Gamboa was a founding member of ASCO a word literally meaning “nausea” or “disgust” in Spanish  a Chicano performance art collective that protested against the Vietnam War and explored Chicano issues is east Los Angeles. Gamboa’s work demonstrates the incredible vessel that is the human body in portraying complex issues within society, as well as captivating an audience with visceral emotion and tension.

Gamboa is quite the spectacle. During his ninety minute talk, he cursed like a sailor, gesticulated wildly and frequently remarked on his affinity for painting his eyebrows yellow. Underneath this outlandish personality, however, is an artist with a deep sense of commitment to his community and his culture. Gamboa’s work has spanned decades of tumultuous events – during the proliferation of gang violence in Los Angeles in the 1970s, ASCO staged a photographic series known as “Decoy Body of Gang Warfare.” The artists created fake scenes of gang violence, splaying their bodies across the ground in a grotesque picture of bloodshed. They then mailed these staged pictures out to news organizations and television stations to create commentary around the monetization of the gang violence news coverage. In another display of rebellion against the system, Gamboa spray painted the names of the artists in the collective onto the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) building. Gamboa proudly refers to the signatures as being the “largest work of Chicano art ever produced.” By spray painting populistic messages onto the building, Gamboa was able to effectively show how institutions such as LACMA have great power of choice in deciding whose art is valid and whose art deserves to be shown.

Gamboa spoke most passionately about his home city of Los Angeles. His most recent collection of work focuses on the demolition of the Sixth Street Bridge in Los Angeles. As Gamboa described his project, he grew more and more animated about the absurdities he found within the city, saying that, “Los Angeles is nothing more than a mirage nothing is real or permanent. Everything is designed to erase Mexican and Indigenous peoples that habituated here before.” All Los Angeles knows how to do, according to Gamboa, is demolish, then build, then demolish again. In Gamboa’s performance piece on the Sixth Street Bridge, he arranges eclectic actors into various poses across the bridge some angry, some capturing images with their phones, some in a state of despair. Gamboa is angry with the ephemeral nature of L.A., with what he perceives as gross gentrification and with the city’s inability to provide for its original Chicano and Mexicano residents. His use of the human body pulls electricity and life into his photographs it is always striking to see another person literally immersed in a piece.

Performance art, for all its flaws, provides for us the most basic instinct to see ourselves reflected in art. During “Vital Signs” Gamboa frequently referred to Trump as “the man with the little hands” and related many of his pieces of defiance to contemporary issues within this presidency. As we are struggling to cope with the influx of news every day, the tragedies that seem to flash across our screen with no reprieve, we turn to art for solace. Performance may not be for everyone, but as Gamboa demonstrated, it is a powerful way to turn sorrow and anger into action.

Contact Natalie Sada at nsada ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Climate change is here to stay in Jeff Orlowski’s ‘Chasing Ice’ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/19/climate-change-is-here-to-stay-in-jeff-orlowskis-chasing-ice/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/10/19/climate-change-is-here-to-stay-in-jeff-orlowskis-chasing-ice/#respond Thu, 19 Oct 2017 17:27:05 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1131412 The most relevant moment in James Orlowski’s climate change documentary “Chasing Ice” is shown within the first two minutes. Clips of Hurricane Irene sweeping houses off their foundations flit across the screen, juxtaposed against the voice of Sean Hannity screaming about the illegitimacy of climate change. In the wake of Hurricane Harvey and Irma, and […]

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Climate change is here to stay in Jeff Orlowski’s 'Chasing Ice'
Director Jeff Orlowski works on his documentary. (Courtesy of Sundance)

The most relevant moment in James Orlowski’s climate change documentary “Chasing Ice” is shown within the first two minutes. Clips of Hurricane Irene sweeping houses off their foundations flit across the screen, juxtaposed against the voice of Sean Hannity screaming about the illegitimacy of climate change. In the wake of Hurricane Harvey and Irma, and President Trump’s subsequent ineffectual response, “Chasing Ice” feels particularly prophetic and more relevant than ever. Orlowski’s film follows the journey of photographer James Balog as he attempts to capture glacial melting in Greenland, Iceland, Montana, and Alaska as part of the Extreme Ice Survey, a study which seeks to catalog and publicize effects of climate change. Balog uses a series of advanced time lapse camera installations to track the conditions of glaciers over the course of three years time. In addition to its poignant commentary, Orlowski’s film is aesthetically beautiful in its display of ethereal glaciers and the magnificence of the most remote places on the globe. “Chasing Ice” provides a stunning visual guide to the effects of climate change, making it both a dazzling natural display of entertainment as well as a chilling treatise on the dire effects humans are having on the environment.

During the course of the hour and fifteen minute film, Balog pauses as he is asked why he chose to photograph glaciers over other climate change subjects. “Glaciers,” Balog says carefully, “are the canary in the global coal mine.” Climate change is difficult to photograph. It is contested, Balog believes, because it is too conceptual for the public to understand. Glaciers, on the other hand, are visual and beautiful. Ice is sculptural, architectural, and ripe to be photographed. By documenting this kind of evidence, Balog presents a more visceral and engaging argument for climate change to his audience.

In my opinion, the visual aspect of the film was the most stunning. The glaciers themselves resembled the surface of the moon — alien, glistening, dotted with holes and craters, dusted around the edges with carbon and algae. There is something so impactful about witnessing the majesty of nature. Many of us have felt it at some point in our lives — whether it’s the view from the top of a mountain after finally reaching the peak or the beauty of seeing a plant grow after tending to it, nature constantly amazes us. Coupling the stunning beauty of glaciers with the blunt knowledge that we are destroying them makes Balog’s film all the more persuasive.

Toward the end of the film, Balog and his team stop to photograph a massive glacier that has a giant crevice running down the middle. They stare down an abyss hundreds of feet deep, only inches from the edge. This scene conveys the absolute paradox of global warming: We as humans are completely dwarfed by aspects of nature like glaciers, yet we somehow have stumbled upon a way to completely decimate them. The shock of natural events that have occurred recently, from hurricanes to wildfires, to tropical storms and inhospitable temperatures, remind us of the danger of this paradox. Glaciers the size of the empire state building have been obliterated, water levels have risen by half a foot and natural disasters cost us trillions of dollars in funding every year. As right-wing pundits and talking heads fixate on the minuscule amount of scientists who disagree with the idea that there is anthropogenic climate change, Balog takes his team into places where we can systematically, categorically document climate change. We know what is going on with our environment, and it is up to us play our role in disseminating knowledge and making change.  

 

Contact Natalie Sada at nsada ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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