Freeway Man and His Sack s, Mixed Media, 6' x 6,' collection of Cheech Marin. by Abel M. Salas David Flury is a Chicano artist. He will say so himself. He won’t say much about the early years he spent attached to a life on the streets of South Central. He will only acknowledge that it was based on loyalty to others. And it was what he did to survive during a time when he and his contemporaries felt compelled to prove they were beyond hope, beyond fear and capable of conducting themselves with no remorse. It is not something he cares to uphold as virtuous or worthwhile. He could have, like many of those he grew up with, been a less than memorable casualty or a permanent resident in one of the state’s penal institutions. His father, he says, was from the deep South and white. “But my mother was from Guatemala,” he shares in a comfortable office at the Goodwill Industries complex in Lincoln Heights where he has worked part-time for some 14 years. The trajectory of his ...

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...