Preparing for Our America:
John Valadez's Great American Streets
Several works in the exhibition Our America reveal that Latino artists have consistently explored urban street life. Some of the urban images we have encountered are quite gritty. Scenes of architectural decay, abandoned lots, crowded spaces, cheap merchandize, and sale racks do not sound particularly poetic. However, in the talented hands of Chicano artist John Valadez, store-front retailers spilling their commerce onto the sidewalks of Broadway Avenue in downtown Los Angeles become a stage for captivating human dramas.  | |
© 1989, John M. Valadez
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In Two Vendors, Valadez captures in photographic detail another fascinating view tying Latinos to Broadway's commercial and cultural ventures. Here two men compete for the attention of female shoppers on a sidewalk. Their street-front shops are so saturated with female apparel and inexpensive dolls that these goods visually overwhelm their displays. Valadez enhances with loving humor the theatrical attitude of the two vendors whose body language and facial expressions indicate a measure of resentment and competition. Both men choose to display not only an inexhaustible amount of merchandize but also their naked torsos as added attractions. The upper section of the pastel functions as a repository of unfulfilled hopes and wishes: a series of female heads with ecstatic expressions rest on the objects for sale, reinforcing the metaphoric links between commercial and manly achievement.
Visit the museum's blog Eye Level for the full post, and mark your calendars to see the artwork in the Our America exhibition next year (October 25, 2013 -- March 2, 2014).
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