'CHICANAO!' a testament to the diversity of Chicana/o art in New Mexico

TAOS — “CHICANAO! Caminos Distintos: Chicano Art in NM 1970–2025” at the Millicent Rogers Museum highlights many different paths (“caminos distintos”) that Mexican American artists in New Mexico have taken over the course of the past 55 years. It’s a show that’s bound to provoke some lively discussions about which paths are the best and which ones are dead ends.

The first path is exemplified by the passionately political works of artists like Sabrina Zarco and exhibition co-curator Pola Lopez. In Zarco’s large, surreal narrative quilt “La Nena” (“The Little Girl”) (2025), a pigtailed girl wears the mask of the luchador Blue Demon while harvesting tomatoes. The upper border of Zarco’s quilt is emblazoned with the Zapatista slogan “Tierra y Libertad” (“Land and Liberty”), while skulls sprout like cabbages in the tomato fields behind her. The girl is literally harvesting her own death, while dreaming of a future where she and the rest of her community might regain autonomy over their ancestral lands. The wrestling mask suggests that she’s up for the fight.

Lopez’s two large paintings, “Who Wins this Game?” (1991) and “Who Wins this Game? 2.0” (2025), are companion pieces made nearly 35 years apart, which take the form of tic-tac-toe boards. The X’s represent moves by neocolonialists to define people with Mexican ancestry within a discriminatory caste system, while the O’s represent positive moves by Chicana/o and Latinx communities to define themselves. Lopez was inspired to make a “2.0” version in reaction to “the climate of this time, the problems of racism, bias and prejudice.”

Certainly the reelection of President Donald Trump has raised the stakes of this “game” higher than ever.

These works by Zarco and Lopez are not only among my favorites in the show, they are also good examples of the melding of folk art traditions, political messaging and potent symbolism that characterize much Chicana/o art of the past half century. These works are partly informed by previous generations of Mexican muralists and activist art-making across Latin America.

A separate but related path is grafitti and street art, which is well represented in “CHICANAO!” Many street artists today avoid explicit political statements and instead focus on simply putting art into the world that will brighten people’s daily lives. Roberto Lara’s rainbow-colored figures with heads that melt, warp and explode into ecstatic abstraction would be welcome additions along my daily commute, but they aren’t particularly innovative or provocative. I’ve seen similar stuff by grafitti artists in cities around the world. Brandon Maldonado’s paintings, by contrast, employ a highly distinctive visual language that mixes pre-Columbian design elements with futurism, cubism, street art and psychedelia. His electric blue and fiery red colors pop against dark, low-contrast patterned backgrounds in his portrait of contemporary love, “La Embrace,” and the Mesoamerican-inspired retro-futurist shaped canvas, “Montezuma’s Revenge.” Maldonado’s work, while not explicitly political, celebrates Chicana/o culture — past, present and future.

A third path is to go all-in on traditionalism. Marie Romero Cash’s three-paneled painting of the Virgin Mary flanked by saints, for example, could have been made as an alterpiece over seven centuries ago. I appreciate the inclusion of works like these in “CHICANAO!” if only to remind us of the tradtions which other artists in the show are drawing upon.

For instance, Anita Rodriquez’s “La Santisima de Amber y Las Abejas” (2018) reinvents Catholic imagery as a fever dream of magical realist imagery. Her skeleton goddess with the head of a bee is gloriously weird and visually luscious.

Then there’s Eric Romero “Jesús de la Raza” (2022). I recently reviewed Romero’s debut show at Blue Rain Gallery, so it was nice to see him included so prominently in this exhibition. “Jesús de la Raza” is a clever painting, because at first glance it looks like a conventional portrait of Jesus Christ. The model is ethnically ambiguous and could certainly pass more easily for a Palestinian Jew than many of the white Jesuses from Western art history. The “de la Raza” appellation alone reveals this to be a Chicano Jesus. Romero has painted bloody marks on the model’s forehead where the crown of thorns would have been embedded, reminding us that the historical Jesus was the victim of imperial state violence. Would the ICE agents conducting their raids today think twice if they saw Jesus in the faces of the people they’re dragging out of schools and churches? That’s one of the more provocative questions implied by this subtly subversive painting.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is “Lowrider Muerte Bike” (2024) by Cruz Lopez — a chrome skeleton-bike hybrid with a femur kickstand. From a technical perspective, the melding of materials is seamlessly done. This is also unquestionably the “coolest” piece in the show — the one everyone will want to get a selfie beside.

The “Lowrider Muerte Bike” also connects meaningfully with Luis Jiménez’s etching of a female skeleton riding a horse, which hangs on a nearby wall. The long, curved cross-hatchings in Jiménez’s etching suggest wild, frenetic movement, and both artworks present Death as a kind of speed demon.

Jiménez was such a towering figure in New Mexican culture that when he died in 2006, then-Gov. Bill Richardson ordered all flags in the state to be flown at half-staff. Placing artists of his stature in conversation with lesser known and emerging artists is something “CHICANAO!” does well.

What the curators, Lopez and Patricio Tlacaelel Trujillo y Fuentes, don’t do as well is to inform their audiences of who the artists are and why they were, or are, important. If we don’t already know who Jiménez was, we won’t find out from them. Ditto on Gilberto Guzman, another major figure in the early-70s Chicano art movement in New Mexico. Viewing his painting “The Beautiful Lady in Green” (2005) without knowing that he was born into a working-class family in the Mexican state of Jalisco, or that he is famous for painting murals of farmworkers, deprives us of the context we need to interpret the work. The “beautiful lady” in the painting wears elegant emerald clothes and holds a glass of rosé — signs of her arrival in bourgeois society — yet the awkward way she holds her wine glass gives away her humble origins. She remains a “beautiful lady,” not because of her attempts at social refinement, but in spite of them. It’s her unforced natural beauty that shines through. At least that’s my interpretation. The text panel is a first-person account by the artist about how he tried to paint a watermelon and it morphed into a person. But artists are not always the best interpreters of their own work.

There are a few missteps in the curation beyond the inconsistent text panels and lack of historical context. The inclusion of Michael Campos was an odd choice, from my perspective. His painting, “Ghost of the Pueblo,” is a haphazard mishmash of New Mexican clichés. A cartoony skeleton wrapped in a serape wears a tourist’s sombrero with “New Mexico” painted on it. Dried red chiles hang on the adobe wall behind him, while a turquoise Zia symbol rises in the background. While other artists in the show use the same symbols cleverly and to great effect, Campos’ efforts strike me as both superficial and formulaic. I would roll my eyes if I saw a tourist wearing his art on a t-shirt, so I’m not sure what the curators were thinking. He’s one of the few artists they deigned to give a text panel to, as well, and the pretentiously worded, self-serious text is the epitome of cringe. “Amid the fading echoes of the old pueblo, the Ghost of the Pueblo lingers — an eternal guardian of the desert,” it begins. I’m all for artists connecting with ancestral spirits through their art, but I don’t think that’s what happened here. Whose ancient ancestral spirit would be happy wearing a tourist’s hat, except perhaps as a joke? And this painting is evidently not meant to be a joke.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are a few ultra-contemporary works in the show that might not be instantly recognizable as “Chicano art” but that mark a new, alternative path. I am thinking mainly of the jaw-dropping conceptual sculptures by Diego Rigales and Tara Trudell. Rigales’ assemblages of primary-colored ladders look like they could have leapt right out of Fernand Léger paintings of construction sites, and the way he elongates their forms, emphasizing their skyward reach, speaks to a class-conscious collective aspiration. They remind me of David Hammons’ now-classic conceptual sculpture of basketball backboards on telephone poles, which he punningly titled “Higher Goals” (1986).

Trudell has two great sculptures in the show. “Look at Us Remembrance Beads” (2025) consists of 6,747 hand-rolled paper beads attached to a vintage fishing net that hangs from the ceiling. According to the accompanying label, each bead represents an individual “killed within the first 19 days of the attack on Gaza by the Israeli government.” The fishing net is a traditional Palestinian symbol, and by placing it above our heads it also alludes to the provisional tent and tarp structures that the population of Gaza has used for shelter after their homes were destroyed by bombs. In “Be a Good Ancestor Dancer” (2023), Trudell updates a 1950s vintage dress with glass and hand-rolled paper beads, bringing a feminist and anticolonial perspective to her own family history. The use of beads in both pieces represents a reclamation and continuation of Indigenous craft tradition within the artist’s conceptual practice.

The curators are to be commended for not flattening Chicana/o identity into a single artistic strategy or style. The “different paths” are quite different indeed, and include everything from conservative Catholic alterpieces to Mexican muralist-influenced political paintings to vibrant street art to ultra-contemporary conceptual sculptures. I doubt any single visitor will like everything in the show. In fact, I’d be surprised if the two curators didn’t have strong disagreements over what to include. Personally, I think there are several artists who don’t merit inclusion at all, although perhaps my opinion on them could have been changed if their work had been contextualized better.

But these are minor quibbles. This is a show that everyone should see. If you don’t live in Taos, it’s worth the drive and the price of admission. And it will be especially useful, I think, for Chicana/o, Latinx and Indigenous artists as a way of thinking through their own art and where it fits along these many forking and intersecting paths.

'CHICANAO!' a testament to the diversity of Chicana/o art in New Mexico