Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.—on view at Hunter College’s 205 Hudson and Leubsdorf galleries—is the first exhibition to excavate the understudied experimental practices and exchanges of a generation of queer Chicanx artists in Southern California from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. The sprawling multimedia show presents the work of over fifty established and lesser-known queer Chicanx artists—many for the first time since their deaths—as well as other artists from different communities, cultural backgrounds, and sexual orientations, who were connected to them through national and international networks. It claims some artists who have not been traditionally linked to Chicanx culture, like the Tejana experimental composer and electronic music innovator Pauline Oliveros, and highlights the sexuality of other artists who have been embraced for their contributions to Chicanx art, and yet not widely explored from a queer perspective, like muralist Judith Baca and painter Carlos Almaraz.
[…]Another section of 205 Hudson titled “Chicano Chic” similarly explores the ways artists used dress to experiment with the mutability of identity and gender presentation. This includes the photographic documentation of Judith F. Baca’s Vanity Table, a performance originally presented at the Woman’s Building in 1976. In Vanity Table, Baca takes on the persona of a Pachuca, the female counterpart of the Pachuco, a Chicano subcultural type popular in the 1940s and 1950s, often associated with zoot suits and stereotyped by Anglos as flamboyant or tacky. Here, Baca performs a Pachuca through her makeup and costuming—eyes lined, lips luscious, hair big, nails long and red, and a scarf tied jauntily around her neck. The photographs frame her head and shoulders as she faces the camera—as if facing a mirror—as she primps, puts on makeup, and fluffs her hair, before menacingly pointing a knife at the viewer. The result is both gaudy and aggressive; the implied message is that you better not mess with this femme.
Judith F. Baca, Documentation of Vanity Table, a performance for the exhibition Las Chicanas: Venas de la Mujer at the Woman’s Building, September 1976. Woman’s Building Records. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the Artist.