Much of the Garcia Collection is rooted in the Chicano movement of East Los Angeles in the late 1960s, which spawned groundbreaking activist art and a renewed pride in Hispanic culture and heritage. The collection includes several artists from the seminal art collectives of 1970s East L.A.: Los Four and Asco.
The Chicano movement used the concept of Aztlan (the pre-colonial ancestral home of the Mexican people encompassing the American Southwest) as a symbol of cultural pride and geographic sovereignty. This movement/community has important historical ties to Claremont and the Pomona Valley throughout ancient and modern history. In addition to this region being located within Aztlan, in the twentieth century, the Mexican muralists Jose Clemente Orozco and Alfredo Ramos Martinez completed murals at the Claremont Colleges in the 1930s and 40s that have yielded global influence. Jackson Pollack regarded Orozco’s Prometheus mural at Pomona College as one of the most important works of modern art in North America.
In 1970, Hal Glicksman curated the first exhibition of Chicanx graffiti art at Pomona College, entitled Chicano Graffiti. One of the visitors to that exhibition was a young Gilbert “Magu” Luján. Magu would go on to attend graduate school at the University of California, Irvine, where he worked with Hal Glicksman. Glicksman mentored Magu in curatorial practice, leading to Magu organizing the first Los Four exhibition in 1973 which featured work by the founding members of Los Four: Magu, Carlos Almaraz, Beto de la Rocha and Frank Romero (Judithe Hernandez became the fifth member in 1974). The exhibition traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1974.
Frank Garcia’s local legacy is strongly rooted in the annual exhibition he curated at the dA Center for the Arts in Pomona entitled Return to Aztlan. Garcia organized the first exhibition with the help of Magu and painter Margaret Garcia in 2003. For 17 years, Return to Aztlan celebrated the rich local Hispanic community of artists and proved to be tremendously popular. The exhibition featured many of the artists who make up the current Garcia collection.
Home in Aztlán will include artists Carlos Almaraz, Guillermo Bejarano, David Botello, Paul Botello, David Flury, Margaret Garcia, Linda Garcia-Dahle, Sandy Garcia, Wayne Healy, Jose Lozano, Gilbert “Magu” Luján, Glugio “Gronk” Nicandro, Sergio Rebia, Frank Romero, John Valadez, Jaime “Germs” Zacarias and Marco Zamora.
The exhibition is sponsored by Carol Holder and John Mallinckrodt; Epic Design Build Inc; Foothill Transit; Bernadette Kendall, Wheeler Steffen Sotheby’s International Realty; The Vera Law Group; and VMA Communications, Valerie Martinez.
