Artbound - Season 13

In 1981, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez wrote “Love and Rockets #1,” a self-published comic book edited by their brother Mario. They sold that first issue at conventions for a dollar apiece and submitted it to be reviewed at The Comics Journal. Instead, Gary Groth, offered to republish it through Fantagaphics Books. The brothers accepted and made graphic novel publishing history.

In 1963, Marcel Duchamp, considered by many to be the father of conceptual art, held his first-ever career retrospective in Los Angeles. The exhibition’s opening night became a defining moment for generations of artists who would go on to revolutionize the contemporary art world.

Latinx artists have been taking center stage at international art fairs, high-end art galleries, and established museums. This episode follows noted artists rafa esparza, Beatriz Cortez, Patrick Martinez, Guadalupe Rosales, Gabriella Sanchez and Gabriela Ruiz working in Los Angeles, exploring notions of identity, language, immigration, queerness, religious and Aztec iconography, and capitalism.

When FDR created the New Deal, also known as the Works Progress Administration (WPA), as a way to provide paying jobs to millions of unemployed Americans recovering from The Great Depression. Over 140 projects were completed by the WPA in Los Angeles. This episode highlights many of these works still standing and asks the question what would a WPA look like if it still existed today.

Giant Robot was a bimonthly magazine that created an appetite for Asian and Asian American pop culture, exploring Sawtelle Boulevard as a Japanese American enclave. Founded in 1994 and driven by Eric Nakamura and Martin Wong, it resulted in a legacy of Asian American artists that achieved worldwide recognition such as David Choe and James Jean.

Since the early-80s, artist Rubén Ortiz-Torres has been working as a photographer, painter, sculptor, writer, filmmaker and video producer. Often associated with the development of a Mexican form of postmodernism, Ortiz-Torres’s life is a collage that explores the social and aesthetic transformations related to cross-cultural exchange and globalization.