Laband Art Gallery Spotlights Chicanx Art

Karen Mary Davalos, curator of the Laband Art Gallery Exhibition “Seeing Chicanx: The Durón Family Collection,” guides attendees through the show during its opening in Sept. 27, 2025 (Photo by Devin Feil)

The packed crowd at LMU’s Laband Art Gallery, at the opening reception of the fall 2025 exhibition “Seeing Chicanx: The Durón Family Collection,” is rapt, listening to the show’s curator, Karen Mary Davalos. 

Giving a tour of the exhibition, which showcases 50 diverse artworks by and about Chicanx artists in Southern California, Davalos points to artist Linda Vallejo’s 2022 piece Espejo 1, a repurposed antique mirror with glass that Vallejo colored bronze, shading people in its reflection. 

Drawn from the 700-piece private collection of married LMU alumni Armando ’76 and Mary Salinas Durón ’75, “Seeing Chicanx” presents an in-depth view of the Chicanx art scene in the Los Angeles area from the ’70s to the present. It captures the impact of the Chicano Movement (1965–1980), when people of Mexican heritage, including in Los Angeles, fought for civil rights and cultural reclamation. Vallejo’s piece is displayed in a themed section of the show called “Anti-Portraiture” — one of the show’s six main themes that also include “Cultural Assimilation through Cultural Appropriation” and “Portraiture: Feminist Representations of Women.”

“Civil rights movements were about a redistribution of power,” Davalos tells the crowd. “It was about justice, identity formation. Artists decided to push back and create what we call anti-portraiture. This is portraiture without the face. They’re going to show you the head, the feet — anything but the face. What happens in that moment is important, because the artist is drawing you in. Linda Vallejo requires you to look in this brown mirror and see yourself in a new way.”

Artist Yolanda González, Armando Durón ’76, and Mary Salinas Durón ’75 at the “Seeing Chicanx: The Durón Family Collection” exhibition at the LMU Laband Art Gallery. (Photo by Devin Fiel)

Nearby, Patssi Valdez’s 2019 ceramic “Blue Venus” is based on the Greek sculpture “Venus de Milo.” Except this Venus is a saturated blue and decorated with sparkly rhinestones that the exhibition’s catalog refers to as “Chicana-punk bling.” 

“That Venus, she may be known for her beauty and her role in recognizing civilizations that come out of the West, but she needs a little fashion sensibility,” Davalos says. “She needs bling. The gal is lacking in decor. So anti-portraiture also asks us to look at that history that we come from.” 

For Davalos and the Duróns, showcasing this important mix of Chicanx works has felt both like an LMU homecoming and a family reunion. 

Davalos, a professor of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, originally curated the exhibition in 2024 for the Monterey Museum of Art in Monterey, California. She was a longtime professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at LMU from 1997 to 2016. Armando and Mary Salinas Durón met at LMU as undergraduate students and were leaders in student government and in the organization MEChA, fueled by the Chicano Movement. After graduating, they helped create LMU’s Mexican American Alumni Association, which became the Latino Alumni Association.

“It is a great coming home for us, having the exhibition at LMU,” says Armando via Zoom a week after the opening reception — and the day after his retirement as a court commissioner for Los Angeles Superior Court, and three months after Mary’s retirement as a career banker at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). “It was all emotion for me, having the whole experience of seeing the exhibition on that first day,” he says, tearing up. “Mary graduated 50 years ago. I graduated more than 49 years ago. Coming back in this way, on our 50th Golden Lion year, was a special treat.” 

“What this collection tries to do is expand on what people think Chicano art is,” he says. “That’s why there’s a range of artworks, mediums, generations. In sharing the collection, we’re sharing the lives and the experiences of the entire community. We learned a lot at LMU, not just in our studies, but through our activism. It propelled us into our careers and civic engagement and brought us to this moment to come back and say, ‘This is what we’ve done with our lives.’”

Mary points out that displaying “Seeing Chicanx” at LMU feels like bringing their lives  “full circle.” 

“When Armando and I went to LMU, there weren’t a lot of Mexican American students on campus, and yet we were able to maintain our culture, have productive careers, and collect and support Chicano artists,” she says. “That shows the potential that students at LMU feel like they can achieve. Being able to come back and share a lifelong acquisition of Chicano art from Los Angeles was heartwarming, and to see people’s reaction to it.”

Davalos has known the Duróns for more than 25 years. When she was asked to curate “Seeing Chicanx,” first at the Monterey Museum of Art, and then at LMU, she saw an opportunity to present the bold diversity of styles, approaches, and influences in Chicanx art, from abstract and conceptual styles to artwork reimaging masculinity and stereotypical depictions of machismo. 

“The Durón family collection is so rich that I knew that I could pick out themes that would each be an intervention into the record of Chicano art history, what critics say, what the media says, the popular view and the scholarly view, including what Chicano art historians were saying,” Davalos says. 

“LMU played an important role during the Chicano Movement, supporting artists,” she adds. “It has one of the oldest Chicano/a Studies departments in the country. This show allows us to bring that story forward.”

Karen Rapp, director and curator of the Laband Art Gallery, says the place of Chicanx art within the American art tradition is important to Armando Durón. “I think one of the driving goals of Armando is always to advocate for a broader view of American art that is inclusive and diverse and incorporates the work of Mexican American artists,” Rapp says via Zoom. “These artists are the Duróns’ family.”

Vallejo is part of that extended family. Along with “Espejo 1,” the exhibition includes her 1996 acrylic painting “Los Cielos,” which features a face hovering in a dark blue and green sky. 

“Los Cielos,” by Linda Vallejo, is among the works on display at the “Seeing Chicanx: The Durón Family Collection” at the Laband Art Gallery.

“This work is dedicated to the beauty of what the Indigenous people call Father Sky, and to the rising sun, setting sun, moon, clouds, water and rain,” says Vallejo, at the opening reception. “The spirit of nature is there from an urban Chicano Los Angelino’s point of view.”

“Seeing Chicanx” is also significant during a time when Latinx immigrants, including those in Los Angeles, have been targeted by anti-immigrant crackdowns.

“The president picked L.A. as a place to say, ‘Mexicans and other migrants don’t belong,’” Davalos says. “He misread the reality that not only are Chicanos integrated into the community, but people love us. And if artists are the people we look to for critique, they’re also the people we look to for inspiration to get us through dark times.”

The “Seeing Chicanx: The Durón Family Collection” exhibition is on view until Dec. 6, 2025.

Solvej Schou is a writer, editor, and strategic communications specialist with more than 20 years of professional experience. She has written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Otis College of Art and Design, and the Skirball Cultural Center. Based in Pasadena, California, she worked as ArtCenter College of Design’s staff senior writer in marketing and communications for eight and a half years. Before that, she was a staff senior writer at Entertainment Weekly and a staff writer at The Associated Press.