Asco’s Stations of the Cross

Asco, Seymour Rosen, Asco's Stations of the Cross, 1971, printed 2018, gelatin silver print, 8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Frank K. Ribelin Endowment, 2019.3.2, © 1971, SPACES- Saving and Preserving Arts & Cultural Environments

Artwork Details

Title: Asco’s Stations of the Cross
Artists: Asco
Seymour Rosen
Date: 1971, printed 2018
Location: Not on view
Dimensions: 8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4 cm)
Copyright: © 1971, SPACES- Saving and Preserving Arts & Cultural Environments
Credit Line: Museum purchase through the Frank K. Ribelin Endowment
Mediums Description: gelatin silver print
Classifications: Photography
Photoprint
Subjects: Figure group
Cityscape — street
Object Number: 2019.3.2
Linked Open Data: https://edan.si.edu/saam/id/object/2019.3.2

Artwork Description

Stations of the Cross was a walking "ritual of resistance" against what the performance group Asco considered the "useless deaths" taking place in Vietnam. The male members of the group (which originally comprised Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez) paraded down Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, with Herrón as a Christ/death figure bearing a large cardboard cross. The quasi-Passion Play ended with the trioblocking a U.S. Marines recruiting office with the cross, symbolically halting military recruitment from their
Mexican American neighborhood. One year earlier, Whittier Boulevard had been the site of the National Chicano Moratorium March--the largest war protest organized by a minority group, and one that called out the disproportionate burden borne by Americans of color on the front lines.