Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. maps the intersections and collaborations among a network of Los Angeles based queer Chicanx artists and their artistic collaborators between the late 1960s and early 1990s. Taking its title in deference to the artist Edmundo “Mundo” Meza (1955-1985), a central figure within his generation,
Axis Mundo presents over two decades of work—painting, performance ephemera, print material, video, music, fashion, and photography— created in the context of significant artistic and cultural movements, from the emergence of the Chicanx civil rights, women’s, and LGBTQ liberation movements through to the political activism around the AIDS epidemic. While the exhibition centers on Los Angeles, it reveals new research into the collaborative networks that connected these artists to one another and to artists from many cultural backgrounds, sexual orientations, and international urban centers, thus deepening and expanding narratives about the development of the Chicanx Art Movement, performance art, and queer aesthetics and practices. Curated by C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz,
Axis Mundo marks the first historical consideration and significant showing of many of these pioneering artists’ work.