The Fire of Life, the collection of performance artist Robert Legorreta, is a fascinating and eclectic archive. Correspondence, artwork, photographs, and other materials document Legorreta’s artistic career and trace the development of the East L.A. arts scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The collection contains more than a thousand LPs, gathered primarily for the Latino imagery on their covers, and toys, coupons, and ads, that show how Latino themes have been used to promote consumer products.

The Fire of Life: The Robert Legorreta-Cyclona Collection (Chicano Archive)

Arts & Photography

Hernández, Robb

History & Criticism

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press

Robert Hernandez traces the history and assesses the impact of VIVA! Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists, a nonprofit artists' coalition founded in 1987 in the Silverlake community of Los Angeles. Their aim was to increase the representation of lesbian Latina and gay Latino artists in the LA art scene. VIVA! sponsored exhibitions, theatrical performances, and educational outreach. It worked closely with other gay and lesbian organizations in Los Angeles, using arts-based projects to address cultural and sociopolitcal issues that were of concern to their community and the AIDS crisis in particuar. The first organization of its kind in Los Angeles, VIVA! offered a stage and a voice for artists who had been routinely marginalized. The VIVA! collection of papers is housed at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. It includes administrative papers, photographs, artwork, VIVA! publications, and documents related to the organization's exhibitions, performances, educational projects, and other events.

VIVA Records, 1970-2000: Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists of Los Angeles (Chicano Archives)

Photography & Video

Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde (Sexual Cultures, 36)

Critically reimagines Chicanx art, unmasking its queer afterlife Emboldened by the boom in art, fashion, music, and retail culture in 1980s Los Angeles, the iconoclasts of queer Aztlán―as Robb Hernández terms the group of artists who emerged from East LA, Orange County, and other parts of Southern California during this period―developed a new vernacular with which to read the city in bloom. Tracing this important but understudied body of work, Archiving an Epidemic catalogs a queer retelling of the Chicana and Chicano art movement, from its origins in the 1960s, to the AIDS crisis and the destruction it wrought in the 1980s, and onto the remnants and legacies of these artists in the current moment. Hernández offers a vocabulary for this multi-modal avant-garde―one that contests the heteromasculinity and ocular surveillance visited upon it by the larger Chicanx community, as well as the formally straight conditions of traditional archive-building, museum institutions, and the art world writ large. With a focus on works by Mundo Meza (1955–85), Teddy Sandoval (1949–1995), and Joey Terrill (1955– ), and with appearances by Laura Aguilar, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, and even Eddie Murphy, Archiving an Epidemic composes a complex picture of queer Chicanx avant-gardisms. With over sixty images―many of which are published here for the first time―Hernández’s work excavates this archive to question not what Chicanx art is, but what it could have been.

NYU Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hernández, Robb. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hernández, Robb

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hernández, Robb. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Fire of Life: The Robert Legorreta-Cyclona Collection (Chicano Archive)

VIVA Records, 1970-2000: Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists of Los Angeles (Chicano Archives)

Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde (Sexual Cultures, 36)

Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde (Sexual Cultures, 36)