A few years ago there was a fantastic street party in front of the El Paso Museum of Art a a part of an opening of Cheech Marin’s collection of Chicano art. Recently a folio of limited ediition prints from that series was presented to the El Paso Museum of Art which is currently displaying that series in the downstairs gsllery.
This is jsut in time for the meeting of NALAC which is meeting here in this month, and, in fact, Cheech Marin will be present at one of the sessions.
There is so much controversy and so many questions swirling around the concept of “chicano art”, from the name to the quality of the work that I have no intentention of stepping too heavily into this mine field. Looking at these prints however has prompted a few thoughts. While it is fairly impossible to give any one description to the art presented here, it does seem relatively safe to say that a majority of this work involves a desire to portray a particular culture either through description or through symbology, which is generally understood by that culture.
This, of course, goes against the grain of much contemporary art criticism and practice, at least in the West. Since the 50’s, art has tended to focus on questions of art rather than questions of dialogue or description. This is, of course, one reason why so much is so incomprehensible, to so many people.
It didn’t always used to be this way. Painters like Hopper and Bellows used art to express concepts and describe a world. Going way back, the Old Masters spoke to both the uneducated with easily recognized symbols, which were of course commissioned by the church for that purpose, but which were, and still are, also appreciated by the cognoscenti for the artistic ability.
Chicano art, often painted in overly saturated almost comic book colors, seems also an attempt to portray a world -a culture, often misunderstood, in order to preserve-to describe and to communicate a particularly rich and varied world.
Cheech Marin will be presenting a workshop at the museum March 7 at 4 pm as part of the NALAC workshops-david sokolec.
