Daniel Hernandez

Call It LACKMA?

Daniel Hernandez
In a hypothetical game of word association, “Important Art and Place” will almost certainly conjure places like France or Italy rather than, at least in the first few rounds, Guatemala or Brazil. It’s just the arc of Western art history. This is why the current show at the Los Angeles......
Before restoration

Helen of Inglewood

Daniel Hernandez
In 1939 a 31-year-old Pasadena artist named Helen Lundeberg, commissioned by the Works Progress Administration, finished a massive mural in Inglewood. The History of Transportation depicted interlocking scenes of Californians moving through time, from native Tongvas to World War II–era migrants from the Midwest. The mural was cast into a......

Pedro Guzman's Return

Daniel Hernandez
EIGHTY-NINE DAYS AFTER HE WAS DEPORTED from the Los Angeles County jail system to Tijuana, mentally troubled U.S. citizen Pedro Guzman returned to his home in Lancaster this week, shivering, stuttering and re-igniting a host of uncomfortable questions for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement......
Ayana Vellissia Jackson

Relatives in the Mirror

Daniel Hernandez
Thanks to the U.S. education system and the Mexican concept of the faceless raza cósmica, there are whole branches of Mexico’s racial and ethnic history that are shrouded by a chronic lack of awareness in the general consciousness, both in Mexico and the United States. Among these, the heavy “Third......
(Illustration by Tra Selthrow)

Lost in Tijuana

Daniel Hernandez
She showers, dresses, clips on her fanny pack and sets out once more from the dusty lot in Tijuana’s Zona Norte at 3:30 p.m., another day of searching for her lost son Pedro. Her pace is sure and quick on the crowded sidewalks caked with decades of grime and refuse......

Independence Day in Gaza Park

Daniel Hernandez
The only plan was to make sure to be at the lake by nightfall, for the fireworks. This was the consensus at a pool party on the Fourth of July in Echo Park. “Were you there last year?” “A tree caught fire!” “It’s a war zone.” “It’s Gaza.” At dusk,......
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Too Chicano for the mainstream art world and not Chicano enough for some in East L.A.

The Art Outlaws of East L.A.

Daniel Hernandez
They enter the Winchell’s just as the artist Harry Gamboa Jr. instructs: Take a seat anywhere you can, grab a doughnut, and try not to look at the camera. It’s a picturesque Saturday afternoon in March. Gamboa has gathered some 25 fellow artists, former students and writers, young and old,......
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Very Be Careful

Daniel Hernandez
Very Be CarefulClub Bahia, May 25There's always an element of danger at a Very Be Careful show. They tend to play venues and in neighborhoods where the occasional bar brawl is not uncommon. And the band members themselves, true products of the modern multicultural L.A., are legendary in the city's......

May Day Do-Over

Daniel Hernandez
It’s amazing how little it takes to make a top cop shrink away from you and retreat in silence. At last Thursday’s do-over of the May Day immigrant-rights march and rally at MacArthur Park, LAPD Chief William J. Bratton ventured into the park to greet people, attempting to make amends......
(Photo by Kevin Scanlon)

Ichiro Irie

Daniel Hernandez
{mosimage} Ahhh, L.A., a magical place where a Tokyo-born, Westside-raised trilingual artist starts off an interview by offering some refreshing and wholly legit insight on the perpetual conundrum of Chicano art. And everything about that is a-okay. “In Mexico,” says Ichiro Irie, 36, “they have a strong impression of what......