@ Riverside Art Museum

October 22, 2022– March 19, 2023

This is an exhibition of 66 black-and-white silver gelatin prints selected from the extensive archive of Luis Garza’s 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 Mostly unpublished until now, Garza’s images document his East Los Angeles community during the early 1970s, his South Bronx neighborhood during the 1960s, and his 1971 travels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. Some photographic images cannot be forgotten. They become iconic to an age, a place, or both. For this exhibition and its companion publication, the organization of Garza’s images is not arranged according to place or chronology—the most obvious ways of presenting documentary photography. Rather, curator Armando Durón seeks to subvert the usual distinction between documentation and art that form the two main branches of photography, allowing viewers instead to construct a narrative of their own. Images are paired or joined, not in an attempt to be glib, but to encourage the viewer to form new images from the combination witnessed. The works in the exhibition were also selected for their ability to evoke memory. Durón suggests there is at least one other side of memory—the road not traveled. 

Image: Sueño by Luis C. Garza, 1972 (Downtown Los Angeles)

Exhibition-related programming:

Art Talk & Book Signing – February 25, 2023

Christina Fernandez and Luis Garza in Conversation – Event held January 15, 2023