Past Exhibitions

This is a past exhibition.

The Califas Legacy Project: The Ancestral Journey/El Viaje Ancestral

January 8 - April 22, 2021

The Califas Legacy Project is a multi-year, multi-medium, collaborative endeavor launched by Museo Eduardo Carrillo in Santa Cruz to document the legacy of our region's Chicano/a cultural treasures. In 1982, Professor Eduardo Carrillo conceived of the Califas conference to bring together artists, scholars and creative social instigators to take stock of where La Raza y El Movimiendo was after several decades of political awakening and action. With Philip Brookman, Tomas Ybarra Frausto and Juventino Esparza they assembled a remarkable group for a multi-day symposium. They argued and agreed that the Chicano movement in all its variety and manifestations was very much alive and needed continued nurturance.

The Califas Legacy Project has unified the Monterey Bay Crescent through public retrospective and multi-generational exhibitions, zoomed in opportunities, street side art viewing, documentary artist short films, panel discussions and a Latinx based symposium - all for your viewing pleasure. The Califas Legacy Project grew out of the recognition that our region represents a unique opportunity to fill in a missing piece of American Art History. The story of Chicano/a art on the Central Coast is decades long, rich and varied. Now almost forty years later our elders in the movement and next generation artists will be featured across the Monterey Bay Crescent to bring you the art and ideas of our region's Chicano/a/ Latinx creative leaders. A scale replica of the Califas Legacy Project moveable mural (the original was recently acquired by the Stanford University Library) will be a central feature of this exhibition. Around the galleries artworks by the individual contributing artists Amalia Mesa-Bains, Carmen León, Guillermo Aranda, Ralph D'Oliveira, and Eduardo Carrillo (posthumously), will be paired in a generational dialogue with artworks by a new generation of LatinX / ChicanX artists - including Victor Cervantes and Irene O'Connell, Amy Diaz Infante, Armando Franco, Angelica Muro and Jaime Sanchez. Concurrently, a selection of other Moving Parts Press artists' books and publications created by Felicia Rice will be on view in the Museum's FLUX Gallery.

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