Artists Assemble at the Museum of Latin American Art
Words by Chris Greenspon, Features Writer, Bermudez Projects
Flores, 31, is one of dozens of cartoonists whose works were exhibited at the Museum of Latin American Art’s Artists Assemble! in Long Beach. Not only did this show fill the void of Latino representation in comics (and graphic art), but these transgressive works also offered a kind of agency not present in typical American faire.
Take Juan Bastardo’s subverted Superman in Aaaggghh. Bastardo renders the icon as a cross between Robert De Niro’s mohawked-Travis Bickle and a figure drawing doll with an upside-down mouth and backward buttocks. An on-the-nose jab at white supremacy and American intervention. Aaaggghh’s nose is broken, incidentally.
Flores said superheroes are an essential part of the mythology of our godless nation. “You create your own persona. You’re half-warrior, half-artist. Nietzsche said the perfect human being is someone who is simultaneously creative and destructive, and that’s Superman.”
Mainstream superheroes tend to be symbols of the military and entertainment industrial complexes, said Flores, like Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark, rich white men who work with the establishment. Artists Assemble! offered working class superheroes, like Sonambulo, the luchador P.I., and Linda Rivera, the Jaguar, a law student from East LA turned vigilante. “Corporate crooks and right wing fascists, look out!”
In JOON aka Juan Alvarado’s Heavy, a trio of young homeless characters represent the mind, soul, and body. The mind is a handsome man with his hands bound with rope, looking downtrodden. The soul is a bare chested, red-haired woman with shadowy eyes, looking like a muse in her robe (“A prostitute?” a museum-goer remarked). And the body, another handsome man, sleeping with a joint in his mouth and a beer in his hand, death’s claw on his shoulder. Not only are they dignified, they’re still youthful and attractive.
The local homeless in JOON’s painting may be the gritty descendants of the indigenous peoples portrayed in many of the works in the exhibit. In Argentinian artist Damian Scalerandi’s El Gigante de Paruro, real-life Peruvian “giant” Juan de la Cruz Sihuana towers over the ruins of colonization which he has trampled. Missiles from aircrafts leave him unscathed and unimpressed.
“It’s a way of connecting to a time when the culture was powerful, and you weren’t a minority,” said Flores. But across the gallery, Scalerandi had a perfect foil to El Gigante, which is as bitter as the Giant is proud. In Un mundo ideal, militants ravaged a town while the cartoon embodiment of globalization, a happy rodent, stood swinging a scythe in the foreground.
Dominicana Cristy C. Road wheeled her grandmother around Disneyland in Querida Yaya, reconnecting with her matriarchal hero after coming out as queer. Road’s work may be the highlight of the show’s numerous feminist works. She also celebrates the archetypal vivacious, chubby Latina with the small, but eye-popping Queen of Hearts. Latinx personality was affectionately and boldly drawn in the corner devoted to children’s strips. You just don’t see expressions like these in Marvel or DC: The focused, buggly eyes and knobbed nose of Vicko’s ScholaR, or the mussy headed, imp girl in Kat Fajardo’s Superstitions, lying awake in bed, terrified of the Catholic statues in her room.
“There’s definitely a dark humor going on,” Flores said, laughing. “Your surroundings and your family inform the comics you write.” His own titles Ex-Punk Girls, The Great Santa Ana Drug Bust, and Ku Klux Kounty are caustic observations of Orange County, but while the works in Artists Assemble! bear the scars of racial oppression, they come to terms with their environment because “in a Mexican joke, life is the joke.
Credits
Juan Bastardo, Aaaggghh, 2006.
JOON aka Juan Alvarado, Heavy, 2016.
Kat Fajardo, Superstitions, 2016.
Damian Scalerandi, El Gigante de Paruro, 2015.
All images courtesy of the artists and the Museum of Latin American Art
