Weekend of Arte and Poetry: Chicanarte Blossoms Again

Wondrous Weekend of Arte: Poetry and Paintings and People

Michael Sedano 

The penultimate week of February 2024 arrives with a sense winding down the interminable drag of the GOPlague. Around here, Southern California exhibits slow evolution from masked fear to unmasked "what, me worry?" fatalism.

All this caca began in 2019, remember? People caught the sniffles and before anyone could stop it hospitals set up morgues in the parking lot to handle the bodies. And the then-president scoffed at wearing masks and shirked the common defense. Here we are now, emerging into a bright blossoming cornucopia of events that bespeak a cultural explosion after the Dark Ages of the GOPlague.

My weekend begins on Thursday with a spur-of-the-moment drive to Riverside. Heavy freeway congestion on the Westbound side makes us happy to drive Easterly on spacious lanes exceeding 70 miles per hour and being passed by Teslas but keeping pace with fleets of sixteen wheelers hauling freight out to the boonies.

"The Cheech" (link) has become the definitive museum of Chicanismo en Arte, and has made itself a travel Destination. The art museum has given gente a reason to make the drive or take the trainride from anywhere in Southern California. The place is freeway close to you-name-it; for example, it's about seventy miles from L.A. airport to the Cheech. The famous Mission Inn Hotel and Spa sits across the street.

Judithe Hernández' exhibition at the Cheech should motivate visitors from across the world to lay down a pittance for tickets to the show. Almost everyone who loves Chicanarte knows at least one Hernández work. The Cheech show offers a cornucopia of new-to-my-eyes work, and hangs the artist's series pastels together, weaving a context of artistic greatness.

If Le Louvre pursued a policy of hanging only the best exemplars from its collection, then one could compare the Parisian pyramid to the Riverside former library. The Cheech hangs singular work, each piece the best of its genre, or the best the artist produced when the comic actor acquired it. 

At the Judithe Hernandez 50-year retrospective exhibition, every work is her best, but some are super-best. Visitors will need a day or more to release the energies that build up strolling from gallery to gallery, wall to wall, picture to picture. In fact, a single visit won't be enough to fill one's appetite for sublime perfection, which describes each work and the entire exhibition.

My Cheech visit was Thursday. Friday, I enjoyed the work of Sargent Claude Johnson at the Huntington Library. Johnson is the West Coast connection to the Harlem Renaissance and merits wider attention. Then  comes the week's moveable feast of arte: Saturday, Huizache Poets at  La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, Sunday, Altadena Co-Poet Laureate Carla Sameth at Underdog Books, the second "we're back!" show at the beloved CM2Art (AKA ChimMaya). 

I have no record of numerous places and events I missed this weekend, owing to time and distance concerns. I couldn't get to Kansas City, San Anto, Omaha, Denver, Seattle, Dinuba, Lerma, Phoenix, and all those localidades where the Chicano Renaissance is blossoming while we watch. I don't know what went down pa'lla, so I hope La Bloga-Tuesday's weekend in greater Los Angeles mirrors the weekend in your localidades, or shall, once your weather turns Springlike. 

La Chicano Renaissance, this time, is actual, sabes? We're back. Mira nomás the rewards of a single week.

Foto Gallery of Arte and Artistas

Judithe Hernández | Beyond Myself, Somewhere, I Wait for My Arrival

The Cheech divides the massive second floor into a series of galleries to gather thematic works into a coherent presentation of theme and chronology, uniting work long kept apart in private collections or in the artist's archive. 

Beyond Myself, Somewhere, I Wait for My Arrival is the museum's first major retrospective. 

The show hangs only a smattering smaller frames. For the most part, Hernández works in satisfyingly large scale and the curator hangs the work with ample white space for browing contemplation.

This foto gallery makes no attempt to reproduce the glory of the work. Fotos offer only faint echoes of the actual power a viewer feels in each work. Even if one attends the show--now through August 4, 2024--visit the artist's website (link) to view high quality photographs and the artist's curation of her work

As if to mock expectations of a masterful creator of female bodies, (and illustrate the impotence of a digital foto in ambient light), the most sensual drawing in the retrospective is a male body, The Surrender of Adam. Even the high-res foto on Hernández' website can't fully evoke sensations drawn by an ineluctable power imbued by color, texture, and depth in the 30" x 44" pastel on paper and deep within your vision. 

Hernández' work demands viewers step back see the entirety of a narrative.  A closer look always discloses fine details that are there for those who have eyes to see but could be bypassed in a stepped-back perspective.

Foto Gallery of Arte and Artistas

Huizache Poets At LAPCA

LA has two "plazas" so it's vitally important to keep them straight. Plaza de la Raza refers to LA's venerable arts institution in Lincoln Park. It's beside a lake and across from County Hospital. Over by Olvera Street, "the birthplace of Los Angeles" and site of the 1871 Chinese Massacre, LA's newest cultural jewel has taken a firm hold on cultura Chicana Mexicana and all things raza art and culture from comida to painting to poetry to festivales. La Plaza asserts itself as LAPCA, and that's where Huizache Poets shared an engaging afternoon reading.

Hosted by Carribean Fragoza, the reading reminds literary aficionados, Huizache (link), the definitive journal of Chicano Literature, Huizache, is back in business.

Fragoza, with husband Romeo Guzman, founded SEMAP, the El Monte Arts Posse. Dedicated "artivists" in print and person. SEMAP sponsors Casa Zamora as a refuge for youth. La Bloga will share more information on the posse in the future. (Posse link)

Ximena Martin Director of Programs nd Culinary Arts introduces the event, held in La Cocina de Gloria Molina, across the street from the main museum grounds. The space is a professional kitchen where Hendon brings in chefs who guide enrollees in food lore, technology, and good eating.

Huizache, founded by Dagoberto Gilb in Texas, has emigrated to the Golden State's UC Davis and  professor Maceo Montoya. In past issue release events, Hector Tobar hosted a blow-out party at his house in northeast Los Angeles hill country. It's a semi-good thing the guest list did not show up for this outstanding reading in a smallish space. 

UC Davis, and Montoya, bring back Huizache after a short hiatus. Marking the return with an innovative publishing decision, Montoya folds-out the dust jacket of the magazine revealing a poster of Helena María Viramontes along with a rollcall of the issue's other contributors. The magazine's editorial policy welcomes writers of all experiences, from debuts to notable and honored guests, like Viramontes.

Huizache magazine's web masthead (link) puts the reading into historical perspective and introduces those reading today: "Since 2011, Huizache has been at the forefront of Latinx literature and art, its goal be the preeminent magazine of Latinx literature, focusing on innovative prose and poetry. Today, Huizache’s legacy of finding writers who challenge the status quo and reimagine our world continues.

Poets participating in the reading are: Audrey Harris Fernández, who has been published in Sunstone, Párafo, and elsewhere; Manuel Paul López’s books include “Nerve Curriculum,” “These Days of Candy,” “The Yearning Feed,” and “Death of a Mexican and Other Poems”; Michael Jaime-Becerra, author of “This Time Tomorrow,” a novel awarded an International Latino Book Award; and Vanessa Diaz, who has been published in The Acentos Review, Dryland Lit, Kweli, and Huizache magazine. "

Michael Jaime-Becerra

Vanessa Diaz

Audrey Harris Fernández

Manuel Paul López

Sunday Afternoon In Monrovia: Carla Rachel Sameth Book Release - Secondary Inspections 

In a conversation with a friend of hers, Carla Rachel Sameth forecast a small audience for the inaugural reading of her first full-length poetry collection, Secondary Inspections. The friend-of-hers and I walk into the narrow confines of Underdog Books to find shoulder-to-shoulder SRO ears turned to the lights at the end of the tunnel that comprises the entirety of the Monrovia, California independent bookseller.

Co-host, IamRomaine Washington, begins the program with a call-and-response poem evoking Martin Luther King, Jr.'s career. Washington raises her Left arm and the audience calls out "tell me about it!". The poet raises the Right arm and we shout an outrage, "Arrested!"

"Tell me about it!" invites the next stanzas and another call. It's a useful technique to warm-up the group while encouraging keen listening to hear that cue. The reading creates a being-in-becoming community of voices. Convivial people listen with their hearts and ears.

Bonnie S. Kaplan's selection, "HELLO 1919" is published in the upcoming Altadena Poetry Review, edited by Peter J. Harris and published by Golden Foothills Press.

Sameth's first selection, Love letter to a burning world opens the book Secondary Inspections. The poem exemplifies what the publisher calls the major themes of the collection, "the life of the mother with loss and nuance as the book’s central figure." Poems share intimate details in an autobiographical voice colored with a mother's and a daughter's stresses and obligations.

Praise the dark that covers us with ashes, 
this morning’s tears, reminding us why we cherish
the not-burning baby cry of awake, not heartbreak. 

Mom, I need a hug, please, 
I just can’t seem to do anything right. 
Raphael, the angel name, should we have birthed
a warrior instead, one who could fight the demons? 

 
AKA ChimMaya, CM2Art: Collector's and Artist's Favorite Hangout

Way back in history, sixteen years ago, in fact, ever since ChimMaya art gallery (link) opened on the border of Los Angeles and East Los Angeles, there've been a whole lot of Chicanos Chicanas Chicanx, artists and collectors, counting on the cultural oasis hidden among a string of anonymous small businesses.

Along with Northeast LA's Avenue 50 Studio, ChimMaya formed a dual hub for acquiring Chicanarte. The galleries are where the region's finest established artists hung alongside debut artists strutting their stuff on the route to the establishment.

A ChimMaya Opening event drew a starry lineup of gente from the OGs of arte to kids seeing, for the first time, real art in a real gallery setting, among raza glitterati. ChimMaya was itself a star.

Then hard times in 2019 and real estate pressure led to ChimMaya's abandonment of its prime corner location on Beverly Blvd, followed by a fits-and-starts of a new home that did not come to fruition. It was joyous news, late in 2023, when the new ChimMaya opened with astounding success. The community was hungry for what only art hanging on the walls can feed.

With year 2024 comes a second show at ChimMaya's second location, now dubbed CM2Arts. Still on Beverly Blvd, people know to arrive tempranito to get a good look at the work. Soon, familiar faces will fill the room and conversation and laughter create un ambiente saludable and everyone's glad they're here.

Maja enjoyed a mind-boggling show of his mixed-media mastery only a few weeks ago at Avenue 50 Studio, that other hub of L.A. raza art.

ChimMaya, AKA CM2Arts, isn't showing Maja tonight, so the painter-sculptor-jeweler is here to support his peers. I use our meeting to remonstrate Maja for being surrounded by admirers at that other show so I did not get a chance to saludar him, as I am today. He says "I know, but what can I do?"

 

Miriam, aka Rebozos de Miriam, greets a long-time-no-see friend.

Vibrant canvases provide an enriching background for animated platica.

Rick Ortega, a master realist painter, has several new masterpieces in the show. A friend is inspecting Ortega's bookmark gift from Abel Alejandre, a noted engraver on wood and linoleum. Ortega showed me fotos of a work-in-progresss, an oil portrait of a noted LA artist that Ortega will unveil soon. Details confidential until the unveiling.

There's more to a foto than meets the eye. Stephen Williams, Isabelle Rojas-Williams, former Executive Director of the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles and a noted art historian, and Armando Duron, whose family art collection currently is on view at the Monterey Art Museum until April, converse with this animated speaker, a noted abstractionist, Linda Arreola (link). Arreola unfailingly supports her fellow artists, attending shows, buying art, a ready conversationalist.

The support doesn't work both ways with curators eschewing Arreola's architectural expressions as "not Chicano" enough, or at all. Chicanos have been doing American Art all our lives and raza gallery-goers accustomed to figurative and impressionist work deserve to see exquisite quality work like Arreola's sublime abstract paintings. It's not a matter of taste but opportunity and exposure.

First Stop At LAPCA
Seeing is believing, there's no substitute for in-person enjoyment, and that's a possible shortcoming of the museum-going experience. You gotta be there at the right time, or it's over.

Art institutions understand that an exhibition is ephemeral, here today, gone soon. Museums publish exhibition catalogs to preserve a show on paper. LAPCA now has copies of Arte Para La Gente, the eponymous catalog of Margaret Garcia's 2023 retrospective exhibition at LAPCA.

On the walk to La Cocina and the Huizache reading, I stopped at the signing table for Garcia's autograph on my copy of the catalog. The catalog is so hot off the presses, LAPCA's online store hasn't yet put the book on sale!

The catalog features exceedingly high quality color reproductions on heavy coated paper. Textual components offer critical insights along with Garcia's and Margaret's husband's Rhett Beavers' personal insights.

Margaret Garcia displays the personalized autograph to her friend Rosamaria Marquez, director of Rock Rose Gallery, a northeast LA  arts incubator and community resource. Foto: LAPCA Facebook.