Permanent Seminar in Latin American Art

We are delighted to bring you what promises to be a very exciting presentation by Robb Hernandez, the Carlos E. Castañeda Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Robb will discuss the work of Chicano painter, photographer, and performance artist, Joey Terrill and show how it complicates the narrow conceptions of masculinity in the traditional narratives of the Chicano avant-garde.

Join us at CLAVIS (ART 3.434) on Thursday, March 1, starting at 6.00 pm.
As always live streaming and the archived talk will be available for those who cannot make it or are interested at following our research from the distance.

Robb Hernandez

Besos Peligrosos: The Maricon Portraiture of Joey Terrill

In this talk, Hernandez will consider the work of Chicano painter, photographer, and performance artist, Joey Terrill. Born and raised in Southeast Los Angeles in 1955, Terrill’s artistic practices demonstrate the difficult ways in which the Chicano homosexual subject has been negotiated in contemporary Chicano art, an image incomprehensible within the proliferating yet restricting hypermasculine nomenclature of the Chicano Art Movement. Hernandez turns his attention to Terrill’s Maricon photo series (1974) and Homeboy Beautiful (1977-79), a magazine picturing a perverse barrio world of Cholo flamboyance and homoerotic desire. His talk argues that Homeboy Beautiful is an extension of the performance art strategies of the Chicano avant-garde and thus, troubles how Chicano masculinity has been seen and interpreted in contemporary Latino art criticism.

Robb Hernandez, Ph.D. is the Carlos E. Castañeda Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin where he is revising his manuscript on the queer visual aesthetics of the Chicano avant-garde in East Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. His book, The Fire of Life: The Robert Legorreta—Cyclona Collection, 1962-2002, was published by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press and earned an International Latino Book Award in 2010.