Icons of the Invisible: Oscar Castillo

September 25, 2011 – February 26, 2012

Since the late 1960s, Oscar Castillo has documented the Chicano community in Los Angeles, from major political events to cultural practices to the work of muralists and painters. This exhibition will present rarely seen photographs from 1969-1980 exploring major themes (social movement, cultural heritage, urban environment, and everyday barrio life) and approaches (photojournalism, portraiture, art photography) that have guided Castillo’s work. Complementing the concurrent exhibition on Chicano art groups, Mapping Another L.A., the exhibition will provide another level of contextualization of L.A. history during this pivotal period. The exhibition will draw from an on-line digital archive of over 3,000 images by Castillo at the Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) Library and a forthcoming book on Castillo through the CSRC series The Chicano Archives.

Press Release

Oscar Castillo

Exhibition Credits

This exhibition is curated by Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas.

Icons of the Invisible: Oscar Castillo is part of L.A. Xicano, is a unique collaboration between the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and three major Los Angeles museums—the Autry National Center, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—resulting in four interrelated exhibitions that explore the diverse artistic contributions of Mexican-descent artists since 1945. Together these exhibitions, featuring artists born from 1881 to 1983, present hundreds of rarely seen paintings, sculptures, drawings, posters, murals, and photographs, and provide the basis for a visual dialogue about Los Angeles and contemporary art through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

L.A. XICANO is part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980, an unprecedented collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, which are coming together to tell the story of the birth of the LA art scene.  Initiated through grants from the Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time will take place for six months beginning October 2011.

Support for this exhibition comes from the Getty Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.