C. Ondine Chavoya’s book Asco: Disgust and Creative Resistance in L.A. is about the Chicano artist group Asco, founded by Gronk, Willie Herrón, Harry Gamboa Jr., and Patssi Valdez in East Los Angeles in the early 1970s. The artists adopted the name Asco—Spanish for nausea—as a way to signal and channel their disgust with the many social conditions and injustices they experienced and observed. They developed a set of strategies inspired by the histories of East L.A. youth culture, merging this with forms of protest they learned while participating in anti-war efforts and Chicano student organizing and activism. They used unannounced street interventions and media hoaxes (involving photography, film, painting, and installation) to illustrate the myriad ways in which an aesthetics of protest and disgust could be merged with performance and spectacle. Chavoya will examine the varied and robust output of the Asco group from the early 1970s to their final dissolution in 1987. Particular attention will be paid to the group’s shifting methods of collaboration and to the ways gender and sexuality informed Asco’s work and its reception.
C. Ondine Chavoya is Professor of Art History and Latinx Studies at Williams College, where he teaches courses in contemporary art and visual culture. A specialist in Chicanx and Latinx art, Chavoya’s writings have appeared in Afterimage, Artforum, Art Journal, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, CR: The New Centennial Review, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Performance Research, Wide Angle, and in numerous exhibition catalogues and edited volumes. He co-edited Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2019), which was named among the “Best Art Books of the Decade” by ARTnews. Chavoya’s many curations include, with David Evans Frantz, “Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.,” which was accompanied by a catalogue that received numerous awards, among them the 2019 Association for Latin American Art (ALAA)-Thoma Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award; the International Latino Book Awards’ Best LGBTQ+ Themed Book; and the 2018 Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC), the organization’s annual prize recognizing groundbreaking new scholarship. From 2018 to 2020, Chavoya served as International Consulting Curator to the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI) in Perú.