Gilbert "Magu" Lujan

MAGULANDIA RASPADAS

A Limited Introductory Offer: $1000.00

The recent unveiling of Gilbert Magu’ Lujan’s work at the Metro Red Line subway station at Hollywood and Vine is a crowning expression of an inspiration and vision he conceived and started working on some twenty five years ago, a fantasy world he aptly named Magulandia. Magu's tile work in the subway station at Hollywood and Vine depicts experiences that have shaped his work as a Xicano artist.

In his quest to elaborate his vision of Magulandia, Magu has processed the myth of Aztlan (the epic Chicano homeland of the North American Southwest) through the prism of his unique and colorful imagination. A vision he elaborates further in a recently completed serigraph entitled Magulandia: A Drive through Aztlan. This work focuses on theater and the movies against an expansive landscape replete with Royal Palms that evoke Califas exotica as invented by Hollywango mythmakers. The serigraph also includes a Califas custom car scenario. The cliché images are intended as a provocative and humorous statement of a fantasy ‘other’ place that serves as a paradigm for ‘our’ place, here and now.
 

ARTIST STATEMENT

Mr. Gilbert "Magu" Lujan, an art advocate during the sixties, helped to define Chicano Art as the founder of Los Four. They changed art history, by having the first Chicano art exhibition in the city of Los Angeles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1974. Magu and Los Four brought to the forefront, a sample visual vocabulary of 'Xicano Culture' as part of the larger 'community movimiento' seeking both definition and validation.

In his artworks, Magu has continued to promote visual examples of Chicana/o culture as a means to gain appreciation for its' aesthetic substance. He takes social phenomena as Low-Riding and Grafittii and presents it as an artistic outlet for public consumption, as compared to sculpture and calligraphy.

Art education and organizing artists via the "Mental Menudo" talk forums has been a preoccupation of his for over 35 years. These sessions were designed to advance, promote, network and discuss the notion of a chicano/ a cultural aesthetic. These aesthetic viewpoints as ethno-cultural experiences are wide and varied, producing a broad band of artistic intents and directions. We are also seeing an expanded measure of economic progress by a larger participation of Latinos in Xicanada art-collecting as relatively new phenomena, as both an investment and cultural identification.

"Magulandia, drive-thru , Aztlan" is a serigraph print and an enhanced version of one of the tiles made for the Hollywood/ Vine metro station. The anthropomorphic characters play out the human condition, as with the popular cultural ritual of cruising and drive-thru food stands. These narratives are meant to document and illustrate the jovial cultural characteristics of contemporary life with a humanistic template. Humor, puns and irony are common elements of his body of work and further recognizable for its' refined folkish 'rasquachiness'.

Magu's residence/ studio is located in the Pomona Art Colony, a Burgeoning art community. Located approximately thirty miles east of Los Angeles, off the San Bernardino freeway and is available for art services, commissions and consultantships.

For further information please call: 909-629-1938

Magulandia studio, 558 West Second Street, Pomona Califas 91766
 

Folk Art as a Chicano art form

Northridge Folk Arte exhibition

Traditions have significance as time tested cultural records and values as depicted in ethnicity and Folk Art.

Artesanos, unschooled with functional, practical motives, also give us fresh spontaneous artistic resolutions which are respected as distinct aesthetic intentions.

Any superiority between fine and folk art can be indiscernible if educational credentials are not required.

Very early in my art education at East los Angeles College, folk art and ethnicity became important and eventually central features in my fine arts career.

Originally, folk art represented, to me, a grass roots orientation and which lead to discovering barrio art forms and establishing my artistic voice and the formulation of Los Four.

Ethnicity became an essential element and device to coordinate my developing art philosophical rudder.

In learning fine arts, new definitions and concepts revealed some parallel art forms found in my barrio environment.

Folk art sensibilities were essential to the process of extracting a vocabulary to help me to find some Chicano Art definitions.

A relationship between ancient cultures and contemporary folk art were found within the focus of craft and similar cultural content .

Emulating Folk artists was an aesthetic choice to emphasize my affection and paying homage to their particular art methodology.

Folk art has been a formidable partner in my art career.

Gilberto ‘Magu’ Sanchez ledesma Flores Lujan