Plenary Sponsored by the ARLIS/NA Alternative Voices Fund
“[Chon Noriega] acts as a dynamic, almost as a triggering device, to intercultural dialogue.” -Henry Gamboa, Jr. (artist)
Chon Noriega is Professor in the Cinema and Media Studies program at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, the nation's most expansive library and archive of materials related to Latino history and culture, and Adjunct Curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). He also directs one of the most active academic presses in the University of California system.
Professor Noriega is currently completing a book length study of Puerto Rican multimedia artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz, and a longitudinal study of online and social media strategies among nearly 180 art museums in the United States.
A recent Los Angeles Times profile* explains that “in recent years [Noriega] has become one of the country's most active curators of Latino and Chicano visual art…He has drawn attention not only to art that hangs in museums and gets hashed over in scholarly tomes but also art that pops up on the walls of Boyle Heights restaurants, below freeway underpasses and in other non-institutionally hallowed spaces.”
In 2008 he co-authored the exhibition catalog for LACMA’s Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement and with Terezita Romo and Pilar Tompkins Rivas made an important contribution to Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 with L.A. Xicano, a project which presented the artistic contributions of Mexican-American and Chicano artists to American art and to Los Angeles’s artistic development through four interrelated exhibitions: Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement (Fowler Museum); Art Along the Hyphen: The Mexican-American Generation (Autry National Center); Mural Remix: Sandra de la Loza (LACMA); Icons of the Invisible: Oscar Castillo (Fowler Museum). The project was documented in the publication L.A. Xicano (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2011).
While Noriega’s research interests are diverse, including avant-garde film and video, the conjunction of film and television history, racial, gender and sexual difference within both alternative and national cinemas, they are always situated within a broader public framework. He is involved in ongoing research projects focused on health care access, economic security, education pipeline, and commercial broadcast media and media access for underrepresented groups. He serves on the advisory boards of the UCLA Center for Population Health and Health Disparities in East L.A. and the UCLA Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Equity.
Professor Noriega’s address is certain to resonate with the ARLIS/NA audience, and will touch on his research and experiences curating groundbreaking exhibitions as well as discuss the relationship between the types of activities he does as a scholar and community engaged faculty member and his role as the overseer of a library and archive of international significance.
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*Chon Noriega's schedule is exhausting by Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2012