Chris Hahn

mpdrolet:

Asco, Asshole Mural, 1974 ( Patssi Valdez, Humberto Sandoval, Willie Herrón III and Gronk), photograph by Harry Gamboa

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In the late 1960s, four young Chicano artists in East Los Angeles began collaborating in various combinations, eventually forming an art collective and taking the name Asco — as in ‘me da asco’ or ‘it (your art) disgusts me’. One evening in 1972, three of its members — Harry Gamboa Jr, Gronk (aka Guglio Nicandro) and Willie Herrón III — signed their names to the entrance of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), claiming the public institution as their own private creation and thus making the world’s largest work of Chicano art in the affluent and white mid-Wilshire area of the city.

Harry Gamboa Jr. (the far right) is one of my teachers at CalArts!