Customer Reviews

Chicano Art for Our Millennium: Collected Works from the Arizona State University Community

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I picked this up on a whim, and liked it more than I expected to. It's the catalog of a 2004 exhibit from ASU in Phoenix (which I missed, dammit) and has a lot of Good Stuff, very nicely reproduced. One page of a print drew a double-take, the repro of the artist's pencilled sig was so good.

Anyway, next best thing to seeing the actual exhibit... I just looked around the web for samples, and basically failed to find any -- but I'll put a link in the comments to Laura Alvarez's "Double Agent Sirvienta," my favorite painting in the book. It turns out that DAS is "a spy posing as a maid on both sides of the border, whose narrative has more twists and turns than a Friday night telenovela. Since 1996, Alvarez has created paintings, prints, films, installations, and music about this character and her adventures." Cool beans, guys.

The art is basically free of political cant -- but the text certainly isn't, and there's an educational appendix that has such ominous features as "Interdisciplinary Transfer Potential". This stuff can be ignored, skimmed -- or savored, if it's your sort of thing -- but the art, which is what counts, is first-rate. The book itself is handsomely-produced, though the binding (a "perfect"-bound large-format paperback) is fragile.

Happy viewing--
Peter D. Tillman