Roberto Chavez, Presente!
Roberto Chavez, Self Portrait with Derby, oil on canvas, 1963
As the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center was closing for winter break, and before the terrible fires that impacted the Los Angeles area, we learned the sad news that Chicano artist Roberto Chavez passed away on December 17. He was 92.
Born in 1932 in East Los Angeles to Mexican immigrants, Chavez began his artistic training at L.A. City College. Then, following service in the military, in 1961 he earned a master's degree in art from UCLA. Already exhibiting work in the 1950s, he quickly became a major figure in the L.A. art scene of the early 1960s, showing his paintings, which frequently depicted fellow artists as well as Chicano life in L.A., at some of the city's first art galleries. In so doing, he greatly expanded the possibilities for American art, opening doors for other Chicana/o painters and muralists, including in his role as an art professor and chair of Mexican American studies at East Los Angeles College in the 1970s. He later resigned his faculty position in protest after the college whitewashed his 200-footlong mural on the campus, titled "The Path to Knowledge and the False University" (1974). (In 2014, the Vincent Price Art Museum at ELAC honored the artist and this historic work by hosting a retrospective exhibition Roberto Chavez and the False University.)
After leaving ELAC, Chavez continued his practice, including a foray into filmmaking. In 2011 the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center was pleased to play a role in bringing his work back into public view with its L.A. Xicano exhibitions, part of the first Pacific Standard Time arts initiative organized by the Getty. That same year, CSRC Press published Chavez's essay "Why Art?" in the Spring 2011 issue of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. Art museums took note and started collecting his work for their permanent collections. Today, Chavez's art continues to be recognized and exhibited.
The CSRC is honored and grateful to have worked with this important artist and wonderful man. Roberto Chavez, presente!