calendar

Monday, February 7th

10 am- 5 pm [LA]
exhibit: 'HerróthiCa'
Trópico de Nopal (1665 Beverly Boulevard; LA)
info: 213-481-8112; art@tropicodenopal.com
detail: An exhibition by Will Herrón III one of the most important Chicano artist and Muralist in the United States and co-founder and original member of the 1970’s avant-garde performance art group ASCO and the punk musical group Los Illegals. The painful re-birth of Chicanos began with the death of Ruben Salazar at the hands of the LA County Sheriff in 1970 during the low point of the American intervention in Vietnam, inspiring a self definition of Mexican-Americans as “Chicanos”, who have been unheard from since the death of the cultural symbolic revolutionary “Pachuco” in the mid 1940’s. During this period Herron was baking Pan Dulce (Mexican Sweetbread) in the family’s small East LA bakery by day and co-founding the avant-garde Performance Art group “Asco” (Spanish for nausea) by night concocting guerilla performances reflecting the religion, street gang, and intensive helicopter police sweeps along with other urban images that burned in his head. After nearly a decade of high profiled and controversial public Asco performances, Herrón turned his attention away from a movement that was losing its energy and began to question the true relevancy of a theatrical style that was becoming “just another form of Radical Chic”. His new found and urgent focus was now turned to the mission of re-defining the Chicano in the coming 1980’s through another medium: music he defined as “Alternative to the alternative” and recruiting a band of civil rights activists, local street vagrants and aspiring mariachis to form what many leading historical texts and documentaries have called “the most important cultural Chicano catalysts of the 1980’s”: Los Illegals. HerróthiCa incorporates decades of re-definition and re-birthing of His “perspective as a Chicano artist” through the use of canvas, wood, metal, glass, and music. In an era of fly by night and “upscale-pseudo-alternative-elitist (and high priced) art galleries”, Herrón had decided not to exhibit any art but rather to retreat to the alley and the bakery of his youth to produce a selected work of art not tied up by the outside popular definition of “Chicano art”. Until now- in this time of another birth (El dolor con el pan fino). Through February 26th.