Xican-a.o.x. Body is the first major exhibition to showcase work by artists who foreground the body as a site of political agency and imagination, artistic investigation, decolonization, and alternative forms of community. The exhibition’s title is based on the term, Chicano, that is traditionally defined as an ethnic identity for Mexican Americans who embrace their indigenous ancestry. The exhibition emerges at the intersection of experimental artistic practices dating back to the Chicano Movement’s key years in the 1960s and 1970s and embraces the work of artists who identify in myriad ways—including Mexican American, Chicana/o, Xicanx, Indigenous, Latinx, Black, Brown, and Queer.
The curatorial framework of Xican-a.o.x. Body draws from the idea of the Brown Commons, a term that was coined by the writer José Esteban Muñoz. According to Muñoz’s definition, Brownness is articulated as a feeling and experience of people who exist within an “in-betweenness” and are thus read as Other. Another important framework stems from the idea of Xicanisma, a term that was conceived by the writer and poet Anna Castillo to define a socioeconomic and culturally specific type of Chicana feminism. Xican-a.o.x. Body features conceptual, experimental, and pioneering works from the late 1960s to the present using a diverse range of media—from poetry and ceramics to painting, photography, sculpture, film, performance, and drawings—that enlighten our understanding of Xicanx art and culture.