By Amalie Rhebeck
The Arizona State University Art Museum is celebrating Hispanic heritage, art and culture all year round with their “Chicano/a/x Prints and Graphics” Exhibition, which is on display from July 2024- June 2025. The exhibition, which was put on display in partnership with the Hispanic Research Center at ASU, features over 30 Hispanic artists and their work from 1980-2010.
Historically, the Chicano Movement began in the 1960s and 1970s during the time of other civil rights movements around the United States, and was influential in pushing for economic, political and social change for Mexican-Americans. Anita Huizar-Hernandez, the associate director of the HRC, spoke to the importance that art played in this movement.
“Art was incredibly important to the Chicano Movement, [and] it was important to all of the civil rights movements because images are so powerful, especially when you are imagining a different future that is not yet in existence,” Huizar-Hernandez said. “It’s often important to first try to visualize that future, and art plays a really key role in that.”
The art in the exhibition came from the Hispanic Research Center’s collection, and features mostly graphics and prints as the art medium. The exhibition is split into two parts, which will rotate in January 2025 and Brittany Corrales, a curator at the museum, said that each rotation is organized chronologically and pays homage to Chicano/a/x identity.
“The first iteration of the exhibition really looks at the 1980s and the 1990s, and it looks at themes of political activism, self-determination and the domestic scene, so the home and familial scenes,” Corrales said. “The second rotation will get into the early 2000s and that will explore more notions of Chicanx identity, more politicized pop art, themes of migration and really looking at identity and place.”
Corrales emphasized the importance of diversity in the exhibitions that the ASU Art Museum displays, and that representation through art is paramount.
“It is incredibly important to me as a curator that we feature diversity in the art museum, not just in the artists that we display in the galleries, but also with our partners, and the community members who we work with behind the scenes,” Corrales said. “It’s important for reasons of representation that people see their stories represented in institutions like art museums, especially people who have been historically marginalized.”
Admission to the museum is always free and both the ASU Art Museum and the Hispanic Research Center are encouraging students and members of the community to view both parts of the exhibition and reflect on the historical and modern significance of the Chicano/a/x Movement, and the art that came out of it.
“This art is a really important part of the history of the Chicano Movement in the United States, but [it is] not just the Chicano community, but also the history of American art. So we are excited for people to have a broader context for what American art is, and specifically to think about the way that printmaking has been important within Chicano art form,” Huizar-Hernandez said.
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