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Archiving an Epidemic is the first book to examine the devastating effect of the AIDS crisis on a generation of Chicanx artists who influenced transgressive genders and sexualities operating in the Chicana and Chicano art movement in Southern California. From mariconógraphy to renegade street graffiti, from the Barrio Baroque to Frozen Art, these visual provocateurs introduced a radical queer languageemboldened by opportunities in LA’s art and retail culturein the 1980s. AIDS not only ravaged their lives, but also devastated their archives. A queer archival methodology is demanded to ascertain how AIDS and its losses and traumas have rearticulated recordkeeping practices beyond systemic forms of preservation. The resulting “archival bodies/archival spaces” of queer Chicanx avant-gardists Mundo Meza (1955–1985), Teddy Sandoval (1949–1995), and Joey Terrill (1955–present) refutes dismissive arguments that these provocateurs have had little consequence for the definition of the aesthetics of Chicano art and performance. With appearances by Laura Aguilar, Cyclona, Simon Doonan, David Hockney, Christopher Isherwood, Robert Mapplethorpe, and even Eddie Murphy, this book stands in defense of the alternative archivesthat emerged from this plague. Thinking outside traditional terms of institutional mediation, Archiving an Epidemic speculates not what Chicana/o art is but what it could have been.

Remixing and reexamining art of and after the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s, this book brings to light new insights about artists, their cultural production, and the exhibitions that feature their work, but also collectors, curators, critics, and advocates. Using an interdisciplinary method that combines decolonial and feminist theory, art historical analysis, and extensive archival and field research, Karen Mary Davalos explores how narrow notions of identity, politics, and aesthetics have limited debates over Chicana/o art. This comprehensive art history employs vernacular concepts, such as the errata exhibition and the remix, which emerge out of art practice itself, to drive the analysis of over three dozen artists. It rejects familiar narratives that evaluate Chicana/o art in binary terms: political versus commercial, realist versus conceptual, and so on. Each chapter explores undocumented or previously ignored information, such as European aesthetic influences on Chicana/o art or commercial ventures of community-based arts organizations, which are made invisible by conventions of art history or Chicana/o studies. The book illuminates the transnational, borderlands, feminist, and decolonial aesthetic processes and social conditions that expand, not contract, how we consider Chicana/o art. Davalos presents her most ambitious project to date in this examination of fifty years of Chicana/o art production in a major metropolitan area.