Film & Media Studies Helene Keyssar Lecture: “Seeing Ghosts: Latinx Video in the American Art Museum” with Chon A. Noriega

Chon A. Noriega is professor of cinema and media studies and director of the Chicano Studies Research Center, both at UCLA, and consulting curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). He has published on media, performance and the visual arts. Noriega has curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Home—So Different, So Appealing (2017-18), Asco and Friends: Exiled Portraits (2014), L.A. Xicano (2011-12) and Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement (2008-10). He is currently completing a book on artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz (b. 1934) and an oral history project on Daniel Joseph Martinez (b. 1957).

Noriega describes the subject of his lecture as follows: “I remember walking through the WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution exhibition with Barbara Hammer in spring 2007. She had insisted that the curators show her films in the museum galleries and play them on a loop, not exile them to a side theater where they would be shown on a schedule. But letting her speak during the walkthrough was another matter. So Barbara grabbed the microphone and stood by her work: ‘Film is an art form,’ she began. Today, media installations and even two-dimensional media works like Barbara’s are quite common in contemporary art exhibitions. This talk is not so much about the aesthetic status of film/video in the gallery space—one dealt with quite well by Kate Mondloch and Catherine Elwes—as it is about the curatorial frameworks that render certain artists and artworks as ‘orphans of modernism’ or ‘ghosts of modernity.’ I will draw on my own experiences as a curator and art historian who was trained in cinema and media studies.”

A reception will follow.