Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. was a traveling exhibition that explored intersections among a network of over fifty artists. In this video, exhibition curators C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz lead a tour of Axis Mundo at MoCA Cleveland and discuss the development of the exhibition. They are joined by exhibition artists Jef Huereque, Louis Jacinto, Joey Terrill, Roberto Gil de Montes, and Judy Miranda, as well as Pat Meza (sister of exhibition artist Mundo Meza), who each introduce their works on view and illuminate some of the connections and networks that make up the exhibition.
This historical exhibition was the first of its kind to excavate histories of experimental art practice, collaboration, and exchange by a group of Los Angeles based queer Chicanx artists between the late 1960s and early 1990s. While the exhibition’s heart looks at the work of Chicanx artists in Los Angeles, it revealed extensive new research into the collaborative networks that connected these artists to one another and to artists from many different communities, cultural backgrounds, sexual orientations, and international urban centers, thus deepening and expanding narratives about the development of the Chicano Art Movement, performance art, and queer aesthetics and practices.
