Axis Mundo: At Work

Event Details

Between the late 1960s and 1990s, a group of queer Chicanx artists based in Los Angeles privileged collaboration and experimentation as they contributed to significant artistic and cultural movements. These include mail art, feminist print media, the formation of alternative spaces, punk music and performance, and artistic response to the AIDS crisis. Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. contextualizes their diverse practices within intersecting fields of queer and Latinx art history. Since its opening in 2017, Axis Mundo has traveled with ICI to six cities across the United States. The exhibition’s tour marks the first significant showing of many of these pioneering artists’ work and contributes to the expansion of research and understanding of identity while navigating an inequitable cultural landscape. Join us to discuss these aspects of the exhibition in conversation with co-curators C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz and moderated by ICI’s Becky Nahom. This event is hosted by ICI (Independent Curators International). Please register for this online event here. For more information about the exhibition and the artists, click here.

PRESENTERS

C. Ondine Chavoya is Professor of Art History and Latina/o Studies at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He is the author of numerous texts on Chicano avant-garde art, video, and experimental cinema, and is a leading figure in the field of Latinx art history and visual culture. His curatorial projects have addressed issues of collaboration, experimentation, social justice, and archival practices in contemporary art. Chavoya has organized exhibitions and events including Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972-1987, the first museum retrospective to present the wide-ranging work of the performance and conceptual art group Asco (2011-2013) with Rita Gonzalez, and Robert Rauschenberg: Autobiography (2016) and Michel Auder: Chronicles and Other Scenes (2004) with Lisa Dorin.

David Evans Frantz is a curator based in Los Angeles. He is currently a Collections Research Specialist at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts. From 2018 to 2019 he was Associate Curator at the Palm Springs Art Museum, and from 2011 to 2018 he was curator at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. His curatorial projects examine alternative art movements, queer politics and culture, historical erasure, and archival practices in contemporary art. In 2017 he co-curated with C. Ondine Chavoya the exhibition Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., a collaboration between ONE Archives and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles for Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. The catalogue for Axis Mundo has been the recipient of nine awards, including an Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC).

Image: (top) Participants in the Christopher Street West Pride parade wearing Joey Terrill’s malflora and maricón T-shirts, June 1976. Photo by Teddy Sandoval. Courtesy of Paul Polubinskas

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