Amy E. Crum

My dissertation revisits the history of Chicanx muralism to highlight the ways in which Chicanx artists created an expanded form of muralism that favored intermedial experimentation with painting, photography, film, performance, and installation. Departing from previous studies that have sought to link Chicanx muralism with Mexican muralism, I argue instead that the conceptual approaches of Chicanx artists in the 1970s largely prefigured the desires of contemporary social practice art.

My dissertation is broken into two parts across five chapters. Part one locates critical sites of interlocution between Chicanx muralists who traveled to Mexico and members of the Mexican avant-garde known as Los Grupos, who shared an interest in process-based, pedagogical, and community-driven approaches to art making. Part two investigates a contemporaneous series of experimental mural presentations in Los Angeles that incorporated community participation within both formal and informal arts institutions. Using a transnational grouping of case studies, I demonstrate how Chicanx muralists strategically drew from the associative properties of different media to criticize ongoing state-sanctioned violence, urban displacement, and socio-historic exclusion. By differentiating the practices of Chicanx muralists from their perceived Mexican predecessors, my project challenges paternalistic assumptions that frame Chicanx art as the result of a unidirectional northward flow of Mexican influence into the United States. Instead, I map the vast networks through which Chicanx art and artists have and continue to circulate.

This fellowship received Federal support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center.