This lecture by Professor Charlene Villaseñor Black presents research on the creation of art for the Chicano civil rights movement, el movimiento chicano, in the late 1960s and 70s. It will focus on some of the earliest artists, including muralist Antonio Bernal, photographer Luis C. Garza, and the painter and printmaker Malaquías Montoya. How did Chicano activists create art in the service of civil rights? What nourishing sources and solidarities informed their practices and desires? Topics to be considered include artist-activists’ relationship to indigeneity, early articulations of decoloniality, and the concept of Chicanx temporality. How can recent theorisation of decolonial love expand and nuance our understanding of the creation of art for the Chicana/o/x community?
Organised by Professor Jo Applin, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art and director of the Courtauld Centre for the Art of the Americas.
Speaker:
Charlene Villaseñor Black is Loevner Tutor and Fellow in History of Art at Worcester College and Professor of Art of the Americas at University of Oxford. She previously was Professor and Chair of the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Professor of Art History at UCLA, as well as editor of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies (2016-2025). She was the founding editor-in-chief of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, an award-winning journal published by UC Press. She publishes widely on art in the early modern Iberian world and contemporary Latinx visual culture.
