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The Fire of Life
The Fire of Life
Includes accompanying DVD-ROM titled "Cyclona, death becomes life, 1992" includes a bonus documentary by Michael Stone.
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Archiving an Epidemic
Archiving an Epidemic
Honorable Mention, 2021 Latinx Studies Section Outstanding Book Award, given by the Latin American Studies Association Winner, 2020 Latino Book Awards in the LGBTQ+ Themed Section Finalist, 2019 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Critically reimagines Chicanx art, unmasking its queer afterlife Emboldened by the boom in art, fashion, music, and retail culture in 1980s Los Angeles, the iconoclasts of queer Aztlán—as Robb Hernández terms the group of artists who emerged from East LA, Orange County, and other parts of Southern California during this period—developed a new vernacular with which to read the city in bloom. Tracing this important but understudied body of work, Archiving an Epidemic catalogs a queer retelling of the Chicana and Chicano art movement, from its origins in the 1960s, to the AIDS crisis and the destruction it wrought in the 1980s, and onto the remnants and legacies of these artists in the current moment. Hernández offers a vocabulary for this multi-modal avant-garde—one that contests the heteromasculinity and ocular surveillance visited upon it by the larger Chicanx community, as well as the formally straight conditions of traditional archive-building, museum institutions, and the art world writ large. With a focus on works by Mundo Meza (1955–85), Teddy Sandoval (1949–1995), and Joey Terrill (1955– ), and with appearances by Laura Aguilar, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, and even Eddie Murphy, Archiving an Epidemic composes a complex picture of queer Chicanx avant-gardisms. With over sixty images—many of which are published here for the first time—Hernández’s work excavates this archive to question not what Chicanx art is, but what it could have been.
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Mundos Alternos
Mundos Alternos
Mundos Alternos looks at science fiction in the Americas through a transcultural perspective, grounded in an understanding of "Latinidad" expressed through shared hemispheric experiences in language, culture and visual expression. If a Latin American science fiction is said to exist, the texts in this volume interrogate where that Latin America, and its science-fiction imagination, might be located. In addition to focusing on specific regions in North, Central and South America, the book's essays cross time and space, illuminating Soviet influence in Cuba, the impact of American pop culture in Mexico and the cross-pollination of European avant-garde aesthetics in Brazil. Mundos Alternos will be an indispensable resource for contemporary art curators working on Latin America, science-fiction scholars interested in visual interpretations of the genre and readers interested in science fiction, art, Latin America and the diaspora.
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VIVA Records, 1970-2000
VIVA Records, 1970-2000
Robert Hernandez traces the history and assesses the impact of VIVA Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists, a nonprofit artists' coalition founded in 1987 in the Silverlake community of Los Angeles. Their aim was to increase the representation of lesbian Latina and gay Latino artists in the LA art scene. VIVA sponsored exhibitions, theatrical performances, and educational outreach. It worked closely with other gay and lesbian organizations in Los Angeles, using arts-based projects to address cultural and sociopolitcal issues that were of concern to their community and the AIDS crisis in particuar. The first organization of its kind in Los Angeles, VIVA offered a stage and a voice for artists who had been routinely marginalized. The VIVA collection of papers is housed at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. It includes administrative papers, photographs, artwork, VIVA publications, and documents related to the organization's exhibitions, performances, educational projects, and other events.
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