The Other Side of Memory: Photographs by Luis C. Garza
February 25, 2023
2 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. – Art Talk
3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. – Book Signing
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Join us for an engaging conversation between Elizabeth Ferrer, Armando Durón, and Luis C. Garza about The Other Side of Memory: Photographs by Luis C. Garza. On view through March 19, 2023, this exhibition includes 66 black-and-white silver gelatin prints selected from the extensive archive of his work. Mostly unpublished until now, Garza’s images document his East Los Angeles community during the early 1970s, his South Bronx neighborhood during the 1960s, and his 1971 travels to Budapest, Hungary, for the World Peace Conference where he met Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.
ELIZABETH FERRER: Elizabeth Ferrer is Chief Curator at BRIC, a multi-disciplinary arts organization in Brooklyn, as well as a scholar of Latinx and Mexican photography. She has written extensively and curated exhibitions of Mexican modern and contemporary photography. Ferrer is author of Lola Alvarez Bravo (Aperture, NY), named a New York Times notable book of the year, as well as of numerous exhibition catalogs published in the United States and Mexico. Most recently, she authored the critically lauded Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History, published by the University of Washington Press in 2021. Ferrer has curated major exhibitions that have appeared at such institutions as the Smithsonian Institution, Notre Dame University, El Museo del Barrio, the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, and the Americas Society in New York, where she was Gallery Director for several years. She is currently curating a major retrospective exhibition on the work of Louis Carlos Bernal, a pioneering Chicano photographer, to be presented at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson in fall 2023. The exhibition catalog will be co-published by Aperture. Ferrer, who studied art history at Wellesley College and Columbia University, is originally from Los Angeles and is based in Brooklyn, New York, and in Western Massachusetts.
ARMANDO DURÓN: Armando Durón has been avidly collecting Chicano art since 1981. His extensive collection includes over 660 artworks and over 1,000 publications and books related to Chicano art. It represents the last 40 years of Chicano art in Southern California and reflects his Chicano perspective on collecting Chicano art. Among other exhibitions, Durón curated “Time Refocused: Photographs of Luis C. Garza” and organized “A Short Essay on Chicano Photography” at the Social and Public Resource Center (SPARC) in 2015. He also has written essays for “Camilo Cruz: Portraits of Purpose: Century Regional Detention Facility” (2016) and “Camilo Cruz: Judges/Inmates/Juxtaposed” (2017). The Durón Family Collection includes other Chicana/o photographers such as Laura Aguilar; Rafael Cardenas; Christina Fernandez; Harry Gamboa, Jr.; and Ricardo Valverde.
LUIS C. GARZA: Luis C. Garza is an independent curator and photojournalist who recorded the tumultuous social events of the 1960s and 1970s, often on behalf of La Raza magazine, the journalistic voice of the Chicano movement. His images captured the attention of many, and later led to his multifaceted career in documentary production, arts marketing, event coordination, arts consulting, and exhibition curation. He co-curated the exhibition “Siqueiros in Los Angeles: Censorship Defied” at The Autry, which elevated awareness of his work as a curator and a photographer. He then collaborated with the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and The Autry on the blockbuster exhibition “LA RAZA” for The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.
ABOUT THE CATALOG: In addition to 66 black-and-white photographs, the catalog for the exhibition “The Other Side of Memory: Photography by Luis C. Garza” features essays by photographer Luis C. Garza and the exhibition’s curator Armando Durón, bookended by a foreword by curator and scholar Elizabeth Ferrer who authored the critically lauded “Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History” and an afterword by Charlene Villaseñor Black, Professor of Art History and Chicano Studies and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles; editor of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies; and founding editor-in-chief of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. It also includes previously unpublished proof sheets of Garza’s film negatives that demonstrate his process of selecting what to shoot and what to print.