No single thought, word, idea or image can encapsulate the museum-scale Xicanx: Dreamers + Changemakers exhibition currently on view at the Contemporary at Blue Star.
Instead, the work of each of the 30 artists in the show lends insight into the personal and collective experience of identity — that how a person is perceived by others can affect how they perceive themselves.
“There’s definitely a big emotional range and political range in the exhibition,” said Contemporary curator Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray, with moments of levity, as well as works dealing with the pain of alienation.
A chosen identity
The word Xicanx itself contains multitudes, described by the exhibition’s curators as a multigenerational, multigender, border-transcending term embracing inclusivity and the complex textures of the Mexican American experience, as reflected in the selection of artworks spanning from the 1970s Chicano movement to the present.
As the exhibition’s original curators, Greta De León and Jill Baird, note in their curatorial statement, “Being Chicano or Xicanx is an identity all of the artists in this exhibition choose. It is more than being just Mexican American; it is accepting the responsibility to fight for their community, their culture and their civil rights.”
Visitors to the Contemporary are greeted by a neon wall sculpture by former San Antonio artist Alejandro Diaz — whose legacy lives on the Sala Diaz contemporary art space in the King William neighborhood — that reads “Make Tacos Not War.” The work’s apparent cheekiness is offset by its underlying gravity as a protest against injustice.
Around the corner is a subtle photography-based multi-panel 1982 work by Celia Álvarez Muñoz titled Which Came First? (Enlightenment #4) that reveals through the age-old chicken-and-egg conundrum how an immigrant’s assimilation into American culture can lead to confusion, misunderstanding and mistrust.
San Antonio presente
Many artists in the exhibition, which originated at the Museum of Anthropology in the Canadian province of British Columbia in May 2022, will be familiar to San Antonians: Davíd Zamora Casas, Chuck Ramirez, Jose Esquivel, Ricky Armendariz, Celeste de Luna, Ana Fernandez and Al Rendón, among others.
A media announcement about the show noted “the installation at Contemporary at Blue Star is particularly significant due to El Movimiento’s roots in San Antonio, and the West Side of the city,” and that artists played a significant role in communicating the messages of the Chicano movement.
Esquivel’s 2014 painting La Tiendita depicts a neighborhood convenience store as a dream idyll encroached upon by nature, with pink flamingos, spider monkeys, a tiger, black panther and an elephant in view.
Ramirez questions the costs of consumerism by photographing a semi-transparent trash bag filled with cast-off newspaper advertisements and political flyers in Trash Bags: American Flag of 1998.
Rendón’s 1986 image of his Tía Lupe with her Virgen de Guadalupe-emblazoned blanket captures the closeness with which so many Mexican Americans hold that symbol of cultural identity, and César Martinez’s 2008 memory portrait El Mosco recalls how characters from our pasts help form our identities.
Political dimensions
Other artists in the show focus on the political dimensions of Xicanx identity, such as Luis Valderas’ The Horizon of 2007, a 14-foot-long diptych painting of the Rio Grande border as seen from Earth’s orbit, and Celeste de Luna’s Our Lady of the Checkpoint 2019 woodcut giving a Virgen-like cast to a humble migrant crossing the border facing known and unknown dangers.
Among major works in the exhibition is Muneefest Destiny of 1996, a wall-filling painting by Alfred Quiroz in the shape of “what was once Mexico” before U.S. President James K. Polk moved the border south to the Rio Grande, effectively invading what would become Texas, California and the Southwestern states and giving truth to the Chicano maxim, “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” printed on the wall nearby.
Author Rodolfo Anaya’s 1972 coming-of-age novel Bless Me, Ultima stands quietly nearby encased in plexiglas as a testament to Chicano literature and a reminder that the book has faced frequent bans and challenges since its publication.
And Zamora Casas deftly combines the personal and the political with a room-filling installation as an homage to San Antonio thinker Tomás Ybarra-Frausto.
The 2017 Gemini Ink republication of Ybarra-Frausto’s influential 1988 essay Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility is included in Zamora Casas’ colorful cascade of painted and altered knick-knacks, souvenirs, paintings and photographs that, taken as a whole, display the vibrancy and category-defying richness of Xicanx culture.
Ybarra-Frausto’s definition of rasquache as a “bawdy spunky” and subversive consciousness and an “impertinent posture that recodes and moves outside established boundaries” could serve as an apt description of the Xicanx exhibition, which gleefully traverses every boundary it encounters.
Xicanx: Dreamers + Changemakers is on view through Oct. 6. Admission is free, with donations encouraged for operations of the nonprofit space. Check the Contemporary’s events page for information on exhibition-related events.
