In this special episode of the MUSED: LA 2 HOU podcast, host and producer Melissa Richardson Banks interviews photographer Luis C. Garza with Charlene Villaseñor Black, Ph.D. who is Chair and Professor of Art History in UCLA’s César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, the editor of “Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies” and the founding editor-in-chief of “Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture” (LALVC, UC Press). She publishes topics related to Chicanx studies, contemporary Latinx art, and the early modern Iberian world.
LISTEN HERE
What is decolonial love? Villaseñor Black shares that “decolonial love is a love for community and for ourselves that breaks free from coloniality, that is, the ways in which European social order, racial hierarchies, and imposed ways of knowing live on and structure our world today.”
Villaseñor Black states that “decolonial love manifested in Garza’s photographs and, indeed, in the work of other Chicana/o/x artists and cultural workers from the beginning of the movement to the present day. By documenting the Mexican American experience of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Garza’s images fought against biased media representation and oppressive policing tactics. By presenting the truth of the Chicano experience and by his dignified representations of our community, Garza’s photographs articulated decolonial love as they helped us visualize more just futures. This commitment to future action is central to activism and activist art.”
Some of Garza’s most famous photographs documented activism during the Chicano movement. However, for the exhibition, curator Armando Durón strategically paired Garza’s photographs to encourage viewers to make new connections with his more well-known images. While his couplings were often formal in nature, they fostered comparisons across differing subject matter. Scenes of protests, taking place in various locales — from Los Angeles to New York to Uzbekistan and Budapest — made clear the global nature of political unrest in the early 1970s
While this episode was recorded on January 21, 2023, it is a timeless conversation about Garza and the images that he took while documenting the Chicano civil rights movement, the World Peace Conference in Hungary, and the women’s movement in New York during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
“The Other Side of Memory: Photographs by Luis C. Garza” is now touring nationally:
- Loveland Museum, Colorado Jun 22–Sep 1, 2024
- Walter N. Marks Center for the Arts at College of the Desert, Apr–May 3, 2023
- Riverside Art Museum, Oct 22, 2022–Mar 19, 2023
“The Other Side of Memory” is available to tour to museums across the country (see photos and check out details here).
Enjoy the conversation.
~ Melissa Richardson Banks
EPISODE NOTES
ABOUT CHARLENE VILLASEÑOR BLACK, PH.D: Charlene Villaseñor Black is the Chair of the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA, a professor of art history, an editor of “Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies” and a founding editor-in-chief of “Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture” (LALVC, UC Press). She publishes topics related to Chicanx studies, contemporary Latinx art, and the early modern Iberian world. To date, she has won 15 awards for her editing work, including two awards recognizing LALVC as an outstanding new journal. Her monograph “Transforming Saints: From Spain to New Spain” was published by Vanderbilt University Press. Her 2006 book, “Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire,” won the College Art Association’s award from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. She is the editor and a co-editor of six additional books, including “The Artist as Eyewitness: Antonio Bernal Papers, winner of three awards, “The Chicano Studies Reader,” “Autobiography Without Apology: The Personal Essay in Latino Studies,” and Renaissance Futurities: Art, Science, Invention.” In 2016, she was awarded UCLA’s Gold Shield Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence, bestowed annually on one faculty member in recognition of exceptional teaching, innovative research, and a strong commitment to university service. She has held grants from the Fulbright, Terra, Mellon, Borchard, Getty and Woodrow Wilson Foundations the NEH, the and ACLS, and the Getty. From 2019-2022, she was the Principal Investigator of “Critical Mission Studies at California’s Crossroads,” a $1.03 million grant from the University of California’s Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives. During 2021-2022, she was at the University of Oxford as the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art. Currently, Villaseñor Black is developing an exhibition for “Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA” entitled “Verdant Worlds: Art and Sustainability across the Cosmos,” to be shown at USC’s Fisher Museum in 2024. She was named a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for 2022-2023.
ABOUT LUIS C. GARZA: Luis C. Garza is an independent curator and photojournalist who recorded the tumultuous social events of the 1960s and 1970s, often on behalf of La Raza magazine, the journalistic voice of the Chicano movement. His images captured the attention of many, and later led to his multi-faceted career in documentary production, arts marketing, event coordination, arts consulting, and exhibition curation. He co-curated the exhibition “Siqueiros in Los Angeles: Censorship Defied” at The Autry, which elevated awareness of his work as a curator and a photographer. He then collaborated with the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and The Autry on the blockbuster exhibition “LA RAZA” for The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. “The Other Side of Memory: Photographs by Luis C. Garza” is an expansion of “Time Refocused: Photographs by Luis C. Garza” on view at the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum in 2021 (and at KGB Gallery in 2009).
ABOUT MELISSA RICHARDSON BANKS: Melissa Richardson Banks has organized and toured more than 100 museum exhibitions. Since 2005, she has organized over 13 exhibitions for Cheech Marin drawn from his notable Chicano art collection and has toured them to more than 50 museums in North America and Europe. Previously, she managed and funded exhibitions in the Getty Gallery and First Floor Galleries at the Los Angeles Public Library through the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. Prior to that time, she founded the corporate partnership program and funded exhibition projects at the Autry Museum. Through her firm CauseConnect, she manages and markets selected exhibitions for museums across the country. Learn more HERE. Melissa is also a lifestyle photographer who shares her images and thoughts about art and artists at www.melissarichardsonbanks.com. Her work online can be seen on Instagram as @DowntownMuse and @MUSEDhouston.
SPECIAL THANKS to Raul Pacheco of Ozomatli who generously allowed use of clips from his song “LaLaLa” for the intro and outro of this podcast.