WHAT IS “QUEER?” “Queer” was once an insulting term of scorn and distaste applied to homosexuals and the aggressive appropriation of this term by the homosexual community as a defiant positive identification signaled a change from the meaning of the term...
CREATING HOMOSEXUALITY “Chick equals nigger equals queer. Think it over.” Unattributed quote Homosexuality In his 1980s series of books on human (mostly male) sexuality, the French...
THE EIGHTIES AND BLACK ART All artists of color are faced with the question of whether or not to assert their ethnic identity in their art or to simply make art without ethnicity. The white world expects Chicanos to make only murals, for example, and expects Blacks...
CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN AMERICAN ART Part One The story of contemporary African American art must begin with the post-war culture and the emerging Civil Rights movement of the late fifties. By that time, Blacks were divided into two cultures—the culture of the...
CHICANO HISTORY AND HERITAGE “We are a Brown People with a Bronze Culture” Part Three In asking the question what is Chicano art, one is inevitably asking another question what is art? Chicano art did not fit into the white Western mainstream definition of...
CHICANO ARTISTS and POPULAR CULTURE Part Two Chicano Art and Chicano artists are, definitionally, part of a political culture of outsiders, people of color, individuals who were crudely grouped into an inaccurate and racist designation “illegal aliens.”...
