Ofrenda by Isaac Pelayo, mixed media, 2019 A TRIBUTE IN HONOR OF THE 10TH ANNUAL EL VELORIO DAY OF THE DEAD FIESTA By L.N. Amoratto It’s all about the ofrenda , you know, the trunk-load of plywood cut into uniform shapes. Pelayo has it down. You give an army of artists what passes for a universal canvas that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg and obligates everyone to work with the same piece of wood shaped into a cross or lucha libre mask or something else he’ll dream up soon and which will allow him to include pretty damn near 100 artists in an exhibition which will grace the walls of the Plaza de la Raza Boathouse Gallery at Lincoln Park. And all 100 of them, well, most of them, will be asked to try and sell ten tickets. Few will succeed.  They will, instead, give the tickets away and pay for them out of pocket. A substantial portion of the money goes to keeping the lights on at Plaza de la Raza, and the look of worry off of director María Jimenez’ face, because you wouldn’...

by Alci Rengifo Joyous expressions, haunting visions and political defiance- such are the components of the season’s most exciting region-wide art project, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an initiative of the Getty Center with support from Bank of America. This immense amalgam of Latino art, ranging from Latin American to Chicano to Afro-Latino, is of late installed in the form of 70-plus exhibitions across Southern California. The massive survey will run from September until January 2018. In Los Angeles, PST arrives as a long overdue acknowledgement of the artistic power of cultural roots that form the bedrock of the city. This correspondent found himself on a shuttle with the press tour covering exhibits at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), and Self Help Graphics & Art here in the boiling caldron of the east side. Journalists from as far away as Chile and Panama were on board, as well as local and nat...

Frank Romero, The Closing of Whittier Boulevard , 1984, Oil on Canvas, 72 x 120 in.  by Abel Salas Curator Edward Hayes, Jr. admits he may have gotten to the Chicano Art party in a roundabout, later-rather-than-sooner way. But as a curator at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach and one of the visionaries responsible for Dreamland: A Frank Romero Retrospective , the recent MOLAA exhibition, he is now among a handful of trailblazing museum professionals making sure the art world understands how much Chicano Art matters and why. The son of a U.S. State Department satellite communications engineer who married a Mexican-born woman with roots in Sinaloa, Hayes spent his early childhood on an extended tour of U.S. Embassy outposts in Quito, Ecuador and Dhaka, Bangladesh, among others. His family eventually settled in central Texas, where remained until he joined MOLAA as the Curator of Exhibitions three years ago. “I was born in San Diego, but we lived all ov...