This Day in History - May 20, 1942: “S.F. Clear of All But 6 Sick Japs”

Clem Albers (Photographer), Evidence of the Forthcoming Evacuation of Residents of Japanese Ancestry, San Francisco, March 29, 1942

Courtesy The Bancroft Library 

From May 1942 to January 1945, in the name of national security, nearly 120,000 West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry occupied ten permanent camps in isolated inland areas for the duration of World War II. Their forced evacuations and relocations following the bombing of Pearl Harbor were not secret: there was much controversy over the government’s action, and a number of photographers officially documented the event.

Nevertheless, it was not until the 1970s that individuals and institutions—within and outside Japanese American communities, where they were a source of shame—began to open a wider window into this egregious chapter of American history.

On this day seventy-five years ago, as the San Francisco Chronicle recorded, “for the first time in 81 years, not a single Japanese is walking the streets of San Francisco.” Today, we remember the incarceration of Japanese Americans through the work of one press photographer whose “professional eye,” scholar Arielle Emmett notes, “captured contradicting realities between the government and public perceptions of the Japanese and the people themselves.”

Clem Albers (1903–1990)

 

Courtesy http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/lange.html

Under contract by the War Relocation Authority’s Information Division, San Francisco Chronicle press photographer Clem Albers photographed the incarceration of Japanese Americans, primarily in northern to southern California. From March to late April/early May 1942, with his 4-by-5-inch Speed Graphic press camera, he documented relocations to and arrivals at Manzanar, Tule Lake, and Poston camps. After his brief assignment, he was a warrant officer at the U.S. Maritime Service, returning to his job with the San Francisco Chronicle after the war.

Clem Albers, Impounded Japanese American automobiles,

Manzanar Relocation Center, April 1942

Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

Clem Albers, A truck packed with Japanese American residents of San Pedro, California, leaves for a temporary detention center, April 5, 1942

Courtesy extranewsfeed.com

Clem Albers, While military police stand guard, this detachment watches arrival of evacuees at Manzanar War Relocation Authority center, April 2, 1942

Courtesy The Bancroft Library

One of Albers’ photographs contrasts a young girl wearing simple clothes and a kerchief around her head with a sign that calls her barracks “Manzanar Mansion.” As Arielle Emmett writes in a study of internee portraiture, he “depicted the emotional extremes of evacuees in a full range of facial expressions, including frowns, grimaces, and even the ‘beguiling’ smile that he may have encouraged in his quick, ‘get it done’ newspaper style.”

Clem Albers, “Manzanar, Calif.—In the doorway of her barrack apartment at this War Relocation Authority center for evacuees of Japanese ancestry,” 1942

Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

As we now know, the U.S. government impounded not only cars of Japanese families, but also
photographs taken of the incarcerations, such as the military’s oversight of camps and residents. As the New York Times has observed, “Photographs of barbed wire, machine gun-wielding guards or dissent within the camps were forbidden . . . photographs of resiliency and civic engagement in the camps were encouraged.” And as Karen J. Leong notes, “particularly those depicting the reality of armed guards supervising the evacuees” were censored.

Such images by Albers and other internment photographers, notably Dorothea Lange, were reviewed by military commanders and branded “Impounded.” Housed at the National Archives, where they were rediscovered only in the last decade, they have lost their restricted status.

Clem Albers, Military police officers checking their weapons at

Manzanar Relocation Center, c. 1942

Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

Clem Albers, Dressed in uniform marking service in the First World War, 
this veteran enters Santa Anita assembly center for persons of Japanese ancestry 
evacuated from the West Coast, 1942

Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

Today, internment photography continues to have wide-ranging impact: from connections made between the internment and the current administration’s call for Muslim bans and registries, to studies about prison photography, to representations by contemporary artists of minority populations and their roles in the histories of communities, cities, and nations.

One example is Albers’ haunting and perhaps most iconic image depicting the mass relocations of Japanese Americans in Southern California. His 1942 photograph of two-year-old Yukiko Okinaga Hayakawa awaiting evacuation at Union Station in Los Angeles found relevance nearly forty years later in L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective (1981), a mural by Chicana artist Barbara Carrasco.

Clem Albers, A young evacuee of Japanese ancestry waits with the family baggage before

leaving by bus for an assembly center, April 1942

Courtesy National Archives

Ironically, Carrasco’s mural, featuring scenes of the marginalization of Los Angeles’s minorities among more celebratory historic events, itself was censored. Objections to less laudable depictions of the city’s history were, perhaps, unwelcomed during Los Angeles’s bicentennial (1981) and Summer Olympic (1984) festivities.

Detail, Barbara Carrasco, L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective, 1981 (Censored 1981)

California Historical Society/LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes; photograph by Sean Meredith

Even how we speak about the internment era is undergoing change. Organizations such as Densho suggests internment terminology conforming to the Resolution on Terminology put forth by the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, which has recognized the limitations of the wartime-era terminologies in today’s world. For example, “relocation” is suggested as “imprisonment, incarceration, internment, detention, confinement.” “Relocation camps” are better described as “internment camps, detention camps, prison camps, or concentration camps.”

At a press conference on October 20, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called relocation centers “concentration camps,” despite the War Relocation Authority’s denial of the term’s accuracy. Seventy-five years later, we have come full circle.

Shelly Kale

Publications and Strategic Projects Manager

skale@calhist.org

Sources

Tim Chambers, “Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of FDR’s Concentration Camps,” https://anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothea-lange-censored-photographs

Chronology of WWII Incarceration; http://www.janm.org/projects/clasc/chronology.htm

Arielle Emmett, “Silent Soliloquy: An Unknown Photographer Chronicles the ‘Inscrutable Laughter’ of Japanese American Internment,” Visual Communication Quarterly 20, no. 2, 2013; http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hvcq20/20/2

James Estrin, “A Lesson from the 1940s: ‘America Is Capable of Being Un-American,’”

Feb. 23, 2017; https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/a-lesson-from-the-1940s-america-is-capable-of-being-un-american/?_r=0

Karen J. Leong, “Envisioning a Usable Past,” in Todd Stewart, Placing Memory: A Photographic Exploration of Japanese American Internment (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008)

Resolution on Terminology, “Civil Liberties Public Education Fund; http://www.momomedia.com/CLPEF/backgrnd.html

“S.F. Clear of All but 6 Sick Japs,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 21, 1942

Patricia Wakida, “Clem Albers,” Densho Encyclopedia; http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Clem%20Albers/

WWII Japanese American Internment and Relocation Records in the National Archives: Introduction; https://www.archives.gov/research/japanese-americans/internment-intro

Read more about Japanese internment on the CHS blog:

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/01/it-cant-happen-here-executive-order.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/01/this-day-in-history-precedent-for.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/02/on-this-day-february-19-1942.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/02/day-of-remembrance-2017-75th.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/04/a-quiet-civil-rights-hero-mitsuye-endos_27.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2016/02/day-of-remembrance.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2016/02/this-day-in-history-california.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2016/12/day-of-infamy-75-years-later.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/04/ms-mondayppie-part-2-anti-japanese.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/05/uncovering-history-through-art-and.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/08/this-day-in-history-august-10-us-rights.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/11/70-years-ago-today-world-war-ii.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/12/this-day-in-history-bombing-of-pearl.html

Barbara Carrasco’s mural is part of CHS’s forthcoming exhibition and publication ¡Murales Rebeldes!: L.A. Chicana/o Art under Siege. Read more on the CHS blog:

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/03/murals-creating-legacy.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/03/honoring-cesar-chavez-march-31-201.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/03/new-grant-for-murales-rebeldes-la.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2016/10/murales-rebeldes-contested-chicanao.html

Honoring César Chávez, March 31, 2017

Mural detail, Emigdio Vasquez, The Legacy of César Chávez (1997), Santa Ana College, California, http://chicanoartmovement.com 

César Chávez died with an art book in his hands.

This final image of the great visionary is appropriate and poetic — because he and his struggle for justice were intimately intertwined with creative expression by Chicano visual and performing artists.

—Max Benavidez, “Chávez Legacy: He Nurtured Seeds of Art,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1993

The life of civil rights activist and labor leader César Chávez is well documented and recognized every year on March 31. However, his legacy is also honored in art and murals throughout the region.

In recognition of César Chávez Day and of the many Chicana/o muralists who have preserved his legacy in their works, we offer a few examples from our forthcoming book, ¡Murales Rebeldes!—L.A. Chicana/Chicano Murals under Siege, copublished with LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in collaboration with Angel City Press (September 2017). The book tells the stories of eight Chicana/o murals that were censored, whitewashed, neglected, and even destroyed and examines the impact on the artists and the Chicana/o communities in which they were painted—and, more broadly, on Los Angeles’s cultural and historical heritage.

Emigdio Vasquez, Memories of the Past and Images of the Present (1978), 1995

Photo: Gloria Ortiz; courtesy Emigdio Vasquez family

In 1978, Emigdio Vasquez, winner of the prestigious Maestro Prize, painted Recuerdos del pasado y imagines del presente (Memories of the Past and Images of the Present) on the wall of the Iberio American Market in Anaheim. The mural traces Mexican history from Zapata to César Chávez (far right). At 13 x 106 feet, it is the largest of nearly two dozen murals the celebrated Chicano fine art painter and muralist created in the barrios of Orange County where he lived. This mural, which still exists, illustrates the foreword of the book by Orange County journalist Gustavo Arellano.

Mural detail, Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma, Fountain Valley Mural (1974–76)

Courtesy Private Collection of the O’Cadiz Family, © O’Cadiz Family Private Collection

The logo of the United Farm Workers, co-founded by activists César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, was represented on one of the approximately twenty-five scenes that made up Sergio O’Cadiz’s 6 x 625-foot mural in Fountain Valley’s Colonia Juarez. The mural, which told the history of Mexican Americans, was destroyed in 2001, when a bulldozer razed the wall on which it was painted and a higher wall was built in its place. The UFW logo was conceived by Chávez’s brother Richard in 1962, when Chávez and Huerta founded the UFW.

Mural detail, Barbara Carrasco, L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective (1981)

Photo: Sean Meredith; LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes/CHS

Barbara Carrasco’s mural L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective was censored due to the artist’s inclusion of controversial aspects of the city’s history, particularly regarding its minority populations. In this section of the mural, César Chávez (far right, featuring the United Farm Workers logo on his shirt) is grouped with other city leaders and activists, including Mayor Tom Bradley, Jane Fonda, fellow muralist Yreina D. Cervantez, and Dolores Huerta, with whom he cofounded the UFW. 

Mural detail, Barbara Carrasco, L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective (1981)

Photo: Sean Meredith; LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes/CHS

Carrasco first met Chávez (far right) as a 19-year-old university student. “I immediately volunteered my services to him,” she recalled in an oral history. “I would work with him for fifteen years,” creating drawings, flyers, and banners for UFW conferences.

Shelly Kale
Publications and Strategic Projects Manager
skale@calhist.org

Sources

• Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-Sanchez, eds., Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993)
• Max Benavidez, “Cesar Chavez Nurtured Seeds of Art” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1993; http://articles.latimes.com/1993-04-28/entertainment/ca-28278_1_chicano-art
• Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Oral history interview with Barbara Carrasco, conducted by Jeffery J. Rangel, Los Angeles, CA, April 13–26, 1999 (Washington. D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1999)

______________________________________________________________________________

¡Murales Rebeldes!—L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege is part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, taking place from September 2017 through January 2018 at more than 70 cultural institutions across Southern California. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America.

For more information on ¡Murales Rebeldes!—L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege see: https://www.californiahistoricalsociety.org/exhibitions/upcoming_exhibitions.html

For more information about Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, see: http://www.pacificstandardtime.org/

https://getty.edu/foundation/initiatives/current/pst_lala/index.html

Murals: Creating a Legacy

David Alfaro Siqueiros observes the whitewashing of his controversial mural 
América Tropical (1932) in a detail from Barbara Carrasco’s censored mural, 
L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective (1981)
Photo: Sean Meredith; courtesy LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes and California Historical Society

There was a time in 1932 when patrons at the rooftop beer garden of the Italian Hall on Mexican-themed Olvera Street could admire an 80 x 18-foot mural painted on the building’s exterior second-story wall. When visitors to this newly opened Mexican outdoor marketplace could look up from the street and see part of the mural. When Los Angeles could claim the country’s first large-scale mural on an ordinary wall in a public place.

But the moment was brief. By 1934, América Tropical, created by the famed Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siquerios, was completely whitewashed—rejected by those offended and shocked by its political statement against American imperialism, rather than the benign ode to “tropical America” they expected. The contested section depicted an indigenous Mexican peasant tied to a double cross beneath an American eagle (a symbol of American imperialism). Siqueiros, in fact, titled the mural América Tropical: Oprimida y Destrozada por los Imperialismos (Tropical America: Oppressed and Destroyed by Imperialism).

Roberto Berdecio, a close associate of Siqueiros, stands in front of América Tropical shortly after completion in the 1930s

Photo: The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

Mural: © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City
http://www.getty.edu/conservation

Colored digital rendering of David Alfaro Siqueiros’s América Tropical

Courtesy Luis C. Garza

Mural: © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City

As the whitewash peeled off in the 1960s and 1970s, a “ghost” image of the mural was revealed. It is this “ghost mural” that the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), in partnership with El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, has been conserving since 1990. And it is the meticulous work of cleaning the mural that conservators addressed this month, nearly 85 years since the mural was painted.

The Getty Conservation Institute’s Monitoring Notebook and a visual of América Tropical on the roof of the Italian Museum at El Pueblo de Los Angeles National Monument, 
March 21, 2017

Photo: Shelly Kale; mural: © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City

In 1994, Luis Garza, the Getty Conservation Institute’s consultant coordinator for the América Tropical conservation project, observed: “América Tropical has come to epitomize the historical mistreatment of art.”

A conservator at work on the conservation of América Tropical at El Pueblo de Los Angeles National Monument, March 21, 2017

Photo: Shelly Kale; mural: © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City

¡Murales Rebeldes!—L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege

While the country overcame significant challenges in the years following the whitewashing of América Tropical—a devastating Depression, a world war—the fight for the civil rights of minorities simmered. As Sequieros’s mural “reappeared,” nationwide protests erupted, culminating in the social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including the civil rights Chicano Movement. In the Los Angeles region, Chicana/Chicano muralists stepped into the public fray, becoming a primary vehicle of the movement’s message. But while valued by the communities they served, the fates of many of the murals they painted echoed Siqueiros’s experience decades earlier.

Chicano Moratorium (Mexican American anti-Vietnam War movement), Los Angeles, 1970

Photo: Oscar Castillo; © Oscar Castillo

Addressing these outcomes and the larger role murals play in public discourse and artistic contribution are the forthcoming publication and exhibition ¡Murales Rebeldes!: L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege, developed by the California Historical Society and LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes. Celebrating the work of seven muralists whose works were censored, whitewashed, neglected, and even destroyed from the 1970s to the 1990s, ¡Murales Rebeldes! examines these murals in the political, legal, and social climates of their time and raises important questions about how to understand and secure the legacy of murals as public art.

One muralist, Barbara Carrasco, saw parallels between her 1981 mural L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective and América Tropical. Both murals were censored—due to their “controversial” political and historical content—in years when Los Angeles hosted or was preparing to host national and international visitors to the city’s Olympics (the 1932 and 1984 Olympiads).

Barbara Carrasco, L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective, 2017

Photo: Sean Meredith; mural © Barbara Carrasco

Courtesy LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes/CHS

In 1984, fifty years after the whitewashing of América Tropical, Carrasco made a silk-screen print titled Self-Portrait. It was described in a 1966 issue of High Performance as “a screaming woman artist dressed as an Olympic runner, about to be whitewashed by a paint roller. Embedded in the white-on-white treatment of the roller are the letters ‘CRA—LA.’ The woman holds a paintbrush reading ‘Siqueiros No. 1,’ . . . [and] wears the number 2 (as if to say, ‘You’re next’).”

Barbara Carrasco, Self-Portrait, 1984

Courtesy of the artist; © Barbara Carrasco

Like Siqueiros’s América Tropical, the murals featured in ¡Murales Rebeldes! endured a lack of recognition—as works of art, as acts of personal expression, and as voices with social, historical, or political relevance. Some of the ¡Murales Rebeldes! muralists, such as Ernesto de la Loza and Willie Herrón, conserve their own and others’ murals.

¡Murales Rebeldes! not only recounts the time, place, and conditions under which the murals it features were created, but celebrates the artistic and personal contributions of these murals and muralists to public art and the historical record.

Shelly Kale
Publications and Strategic Projects Manager
skale@calhist.org

Sources

• América Tropical Interpretive Center, Education; https://theamericatropical.org/ 
• Linda Burnham, “Barbara Carrasco and Public Activist Art,” High Performance (1986)
• Getty Conservation Institute, Conservation of América Tropical; http://www.getty.edu/conservation/our_projects/field_projects/siqueiros/index.html 
• Jeffrey Levin, “América Tropical,” Conservation Perspectives 9, no. 2 (Summer 1994); http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/newsletters/9_2/tropical.html
• http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-david-alfaro-siqueiros-mural-20170407-story.html

¡Murales Rebeldes!—L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege is part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, taking place from September 2017 through January 2018 at more than 70 cultural institutions across Southern California. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America.

For more information on ¡Murales Rebeldes!—L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege see:
https://www.californiahistoricalsociety.org/exhibitions/upcoming_exhibitions.html

For more information about Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, see http://www.pacificstandardtime.org/
https://getty.edu/foundation/initiatives/current/pst_lala/index.html

New grant for ¡Murales Rebeldes!: L.A. Chicana/o Murals Under Siege

Barbara Carrasco's L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective 

We are pleased to announce that our upcoming exhibition, ¡Murales Rebeldes!: L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege, has received a $40,000 grant from the Mike Kelly Foundation for the Arts in Los Angeles. This exhibition, created in partnership with LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, will be part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative this Fall.

The summary of the grant is below and included in this official release and here: 

¡MURALES REBELDES!
L.A. Chicana/o Murals Under Siege 

Jointly presented by the California Historical Society and LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, ¡Murales Rebeldes!: L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege explores the ways in which Chicana/o murals in the greater Los Angeles area have been censored, whitewashed, neglected, and even destroyed. Through the stories of seven muralists, the exhibition offers viewers insight into the powerful and radical messages that murals can carry, as well as the means by which these messages can be suppressed. The exhibition will be held at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in downtown Los Angeles.

A centerpiece of the project is Barbara Carrasco’s L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective (1981), a piece that typifies the struggles of Chicana/o muralists. Originally sponsored by the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) for the city’s bicentennial celebration, Carrasco’s 16-by-80-foot portable mural depicts Los Angeles's history from the perspective of its ethnic communities. The mural was censored by the CRA and became a symbol of the struggle over competing visions of the city's history. Since its creation, L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective has only been displayed once in its entirety, at Union Station in 1990. The exhibition will bring the mural back for public viewing for the first time in 25 years.

You can read more about the grant here:

https://www.artforum.com/news/id=67354

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-mike-kelley-foundation-grants-20170320-story.html

http://www.artnews.com/2017/03/22/mike-kelley-foundation-for-the-arts-announces-2017-artist-project-grants/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

¡Murales Rebeldes!: Contested Chicana/o Public Art

Remains of the East Los Streetscapers’ mural Filling Up on Ancient Energies (1981), and the wall on which it was painted, clutter 4th and Soto Streets in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, on May 24, 1988. The mural was destroyed without notifying the artists.

In March, the J. Paul Getty Foundation awarded a grant to the California Historical Society in partnership with LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes of Los Angeles for an exhibition that will be part of “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.” This Getty initiative brings together over 40 museums and cultural institutions across Southern California. Through a series of exhibitions, publications, and programs, participating organizations will realize the goals of the project: to create a dialogue between Latin American and Latino art and Los Angeles.

In September 2017, CHS and LA Plaza will present ¡Murales Rebeldes!: Contested Chicana/o Public Art. The exhibition and companion publication will look at the ways in which Chicana/o murals in the greater Los Angeles area have been contested, challenged, censored, and even destroyed.

Why ¡Murales Rebeldes!: Contested Chicana/o Public Art?

Chicana/o murals often have been sites of controversy. The ways in which their creators provoke the dominant cultural norm and challenge the assumed historic narrative have often resulted in the desecration, whitewashing, or destruction of these works of art. Outright neglect and mistreatment of murals, as well as dismissal of their artistic and historical value, also threaten the survival of these works.

The exhibition will explore murals by Barbara Carrasco, Yriena Cervántez, Roberto Chávez, Ernesto de la Loza, East Los Streetscapers, Willie Herrón, and Sergio O’Cadiz. In this exhibition in the historic heart of Los Angeles, LA Plaza and CHS will examine the iconography, content, and artistic strategies of these key Los Angeles area Chicana/o murals that have made others uncomfortable to the point of provoking a contrary response. The exhibition will delve into the murals’ complicated creation and subsequent disturbing history of censorship. Through photography of the murals, preparatory sketches, related art works, and ephemera, the exhibition will tell the story of the mural from its genesis to its end.

A heavily illustrated companion publication of the same title—also released in September 2017 and published by Los Angeles publisher Angel City Press—will expand on the murals’ themes and controversies. With a foreword and afterword by Gustavo Arellano, publisher and editor of Orange County Weekly, and photographs by noted photographic journalist Oscar Castillo—many of them commissioned especially for this publication—the book will reach beyond a traditional exhibition catalogue to portray these murals as what co-curator Guiesela Latorre describes as “public platforms to protest against the injustices of institutionalized racism, including police brutality, educational inequality, inferior working conditions, and persisting colonial legacies.”

Barbara Carrasco’s massive L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective (1981) never made it to its designated location at 330 South Broadway in downtown Los Angeles due to its honest portrayal of Los Angeles’s history. Today it is in storage but will be brought to light again in the exhibition.

An investment company in Miami, Florida, could determine the fate of Willie Herrón’s The Wall That Cracked Open (1972). Painted in response to the violent stabbing of Herron’s brother in an alleyway, the mural has been conserved and cared for over the years by the artist himself.

Less than five years after its completion, Roberto Chávez’s The Path to Knowledge and the False University (1974–75) was completely obliterated by the college administration that had originally commissioned it.

Yreina Cervántez and Alma Lopez’s Huntington Beach mural Historia de Adentro/La Historia de Afuera, The History from Within/The History from Without (1995) was destroyed after years of graffiti and eventually painted out completely.

Sergio O’Cadiz’s mural (1975) was starved of resources after Fountain Valley officials who had commissioned it saw a panel showing police mistreating a Chicano youth. The mural was neglected, left to decay, and finally bulldozed by the city.

The complete disappearance of El Nuevo Mundo: Homage to the Workers (1997) (above) in Echo Park and the ongoing corrosion of his best known work, Resurrection of the Green Planet (1990–91) (below) in Boyle Heights tell the distinct yet interrelated stories of a disappeared and a disappearing mural, both embodying the death and near death of Chicana/o muralism.

¡Murales Rebeldes!: Contested Chicana/o Public Art opens on September 4, 2017, and will be on view through January 29, 2018, at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in downtown Los Angeles.

Stay tuned for updates on this exciting project!

Jessica Hough
Director of Exhibitions
jhough@calhist.org

¡Murales Rebeldes!: Contested Chicana/o Public Art

Barbara Carrasco, L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective (1981)

Today the J. Paul Getty Foundation announced that 43 museums and cultural institutions from Santa Barbara to San Diego will be creating exhibitions focused on Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles. The program—Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA—will take place in the fall of next year, and we are very pleased to announce that we are participating in this collaboration of arts institutions in Southern California!

In partnership with LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, a cultural center focused on the Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles and Southern California, CHS will present ¡Murales Rebeldes!: Contested Chicana/o Public Art. The exhibition will look at the way in which Chicana/o murals in the greater Los Angeles area have been contested, challenged, censored, and even destroyed.

Murals became an essential form of artist response and public voice during el movimiento/the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and particularly after the Chicano Moratorium’s formation in 1968 and the powerful march in East Los Angeles in 1970. .Murals were a means of expressing both pride and frustration at a time when other channels of communication were limited for the Mexican-American community.

The exhibition will explore murals by Barbara Carrasco, Roberto Chavez, Sergio O’Cadiz, among others. Through photography of the murals, sketches, related art works, and ephemera, the exhibition will tell the story of the mural from its genesis to its end.

Mexican-American artists developed imagery to communicate their struggles, assert their rights as citizens, and as author and co-curator Guisela Latorre writes in Walls of Empowerment, “aid in the formation of a Chicana/o nationalist identity.” While asserting cultural identity via this evolving visual vocabulary, artists also used murals as public platforms to protest against the injustices of institutionalized racism, including police brutality, educational inequality, inferior working conditions, and persisting colonial legacies.

It is difficult to underestimate the personal, political, and artistic significance of the creation of murals in the vast Los Angeles region, as LA has proven fertile ground for thousands of murals. Chicana/o murals have often been sites of controversy. The ways in which their creators provoke the dominant cultural norm and challenge the assumed historic narrative have often resulted in the desecration, whitewashing, or destruction of these works of art. Outright neglect and mistreatment of murals, as well as dismissal of their artistic and historical value, also threaten the survival of these works.

In this exhibition in the historic heart of Los Angeles, LA Plaza and CHS will examine the iconography, content, and artistic strategies of key Los Angeles area Chicana/o murals that have made others uncomfortable to the point of provoking a contrary response, delving into the murals’ complicated creation and subsequent disturbing history of censorship.

¡Murales Rebeldes!: Contested Chicana/o Public Art will open on September 4, 2017  and will be on view through January 29, 2018 at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes.

Stay tuned for updates on this exciting project!

Jessica Hough
Director of Exhibitions
jhough@calhist.org