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Richard Lou: Stories On My Back
06/05/15 – 07/03/15
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm
Crosstown Arts is pleased to present Stories On My Back, a large-scale multi-media installation incorporating audio, video, digital photographs, and tamale leaves created by Memphis artist Richard Lou. The installation, never before seen in its entirety in Memphis, is an immersive experience alluding to a ceremonial site where people come to share their stories and personal histories. The piece is informed by stories exchanged through the artist’s family: stories told by the artist’s mother and father, the stories he shared with his children, and the stories retold by his children as their own.
Stories On My Back from Crosstown Arts on Vimeo.
The thousands of tamale leaves in the installation speak to the artist’s bi-cultural heritage as a Chinese/Mexican, or what artist/activist Guillermo Gomez-Peña would a “Chicanese,” a Chicano/Chinese. The stories mix personal history within the larger context of the external historical forces that brought the artist’s families together, or threatened to pull them apart. They are stories of loss, dreams, isolation, ignorance, race, disparities of power, assimilation, spirit, and subjugated knowledge and wisdom.
Included in the installation is Lou’s father’s chair, where Lou Yet Ming would sit and watch John Wayne westerns and movies about World War II. Lou’s father served in the U.S. Marine Corp during World War II and was honorably discharged as a Technical Sergeant. Lou Yet Ming’s recliner was re-designed and brought back to life by Louisiana artist Chere Labbe Doiron, reupholstered with images of the artist’s children and his mother. It has traveled with the exhibition for the last two years and now has become an integral component of the larger installation.
Richard Lou was born in San Diego, CA and raised in San Diego and Tijuana, BCN, MX. He has over 20 years of teaching experience in higher education, over 15 years of arts administration experience, has curated over 30 exhibitions, and continues to produce and exhibit art while teaching and chairing the Department of Art at the University of Memphis.
Crosstown Arts thanks the First Tennessee Foundation | ArtsFirst and ArtMemphis for support of this exhibition and its related programs, which are part of an ongoing artistic and community partnership between Crosstown Arts and Centro Cultural. More details about the18-month schedule of collaborative exhibitions and events, and several long-term cultural projects, can be found at crosstownarts.org/centro-cultural-collaboration.
Stories On My Back Events
Opening Festivities: Friday, June 5
- 9am: WKNO Checking on the Arts interview with Richard Lou
- 6 pm: Blessing by Danza Azteca Quetzalcoatl
- 6:15 pm: Performance from singer/songwriter Savannah Long
- 7 pm: Cuban and Latin folk music by Los Cantadores
- 6 – 9 pm: Hot Mess Burritos food truck, empanadas from Havana’s Pilon, paletas by Michoachana, elote (grilled corn) and a wide variety of cold beverages!
Exhibition Programs: Saturday, June 6, 2-4 pm
- 2 pm: Lecture by Visiting Scholar Guisela Latorre, 430 N. Cleveland
- 3 pm: Gallery Talk with Richard Lou & Guisela Latorre, 422 N. Cleveland
Press for Stories On My Back
Art Review: Richard Lou explores mixed heritage in ‘Stories on My Back’ at Crosstown Arts
Fredric Koeppel / Commercial Appeal / June, 2015
Artist Biography
Richard Alexander Lou was born in San Diego, CA and raised in San Diego and Tijuana, BCN, MX. Richard grew up in a biracial family, spiritually and intellectually guided by an anti-colonialist Chinese father and a culturally affirming Mexicana mother. Educated at Southwestern College, Chula Vista, CA receiving an A.A. in Fine Art in 1981; California State University at Fullerton, CA receiving a B.A. in Fine Art in 1983; Clemson University, Clemson, SC receiving an M.F.A. in Fine Art in 1986.
Lou has exhibited at the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Wing Luke Museum, Seattle, WA; Landmark Gallery, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX; Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City DF, Mexico; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, TX; Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA; Cornerhouse Art Gallery, Manchester, England; the 3rd International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, Istanbul, Turkey; Dong-A University, Busan, South Korea; Miami Museum, Miami, FL; Museum of Photographic Arts, Balboa Park, San Diego, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Mexican Fine Arts Museum, Chicago, IL; Otis School of Art and Design, Otis Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston, MA; Aperto 90` Section, La Biennale Di Venezia, Venice, Italy; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY, NY; Dia Foundation, NY, NY; Artist Space, NY, NY. Richard Lou’s artwork has been published and/or cited in various newspapers, magazines, catalogs, electronic media, and over 30 books. Lou has over 20 years of teaching experience in higher education, over 15 years of arts administration experience, has curated over 30 exhibitions, and continues to produce and exhibit art while teaching and chairing the Department of Art at the University of Memphis.
Artist Statement
“There has never been a free people, a free country, a real democracy on the face of this Earth. In a city of some 300,000 slaves and 90,000 so called free men, Plato sat down and praised freedom in exquisitely elegant phrases.” Lerone Bennett Jr.
As a Chicano artist the recurrent themes are the subjugation of my community by the dominant culture and white privelege. These works manifest themselves in the creation of counter-images and counter-definitions made in a self-determinant manner. As a contemporary image-maker I am interested in collecting dissonant ideas and narratives allowing them to bump into each other, to coax new meanings and possibilities that dismantle the hierarchy of images. The work serves as an ideological, social, political, and cultural matrix from which I understand my place in this world and to make a simple marking of the cultural shifts of my community. The artwork examines how communities use images and language to dehumanize the “Other” in order to ignore the “Other’s” basic human rights. It challenges unquestioned claims to territory and legal status.
“Art is one of the most sacred ways to communicate.” Consuelo Jimenez Underwood
The work that I create as a Chicano artist emanates and is in response to the love I have for my family. The work embraces the contradictions, the conflicts and triumphs, the quiet and raucous moments of a routine day, the flowering, the decaying, the markings and ceremonies that compose a lifetime all within a society that subjugates. At the core, all work I do is for them. And in that hopeful light, I am willing to take the chance that the power of the work will ultimately save my children who will become the inhabitants of a New Nepantla as they negotiate a home in this destabilized world.
-Richard Lou
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Lecture on June 6, 2 pm at 430 N. Cleveland
Stories on My Back by Richard Lou: Installation Art, Transnationalism and the Chinese-Chicano Experience
Performance, installation and new media artist Richard Lou’s work has compelled spectators to think critically about bordered identities, power inequities, post-colonial realities, race relations, and other socially relevant issues. His provocative and dynamic performances, installations and multimedia pieces have also encouraged audiences to problematize clear distinctions between art and activism and between creative endeavors and social justice work.
Primarily known as a Chicano artist, Lou’s work for the past ten years, however, has paid great attention to his Chinese heritage and to the transnational subjectivities that animate social identities. Having grown up in the San Diego/Tijuana border region with a Mexican mother and a Chinese father, Lou’s experiences have been defined by the transnationalism of the border region itself but also by the biculturalism of his upbringing.
In this presentation, Guisela Latorre will focus on one of the artist’s installation Stories on my Back on display at the Crosstown Arts Gallery. Without losing sight of the politically engaged and collective nature of his art, this work is among the most introspective and deeply personal of the artist’s career. Utilizing the images and voices of the artist’s children and deploying story-telling devices throughout the installation, Lou articulates a transnational identity that is, on the one hand, quite intimate and unique to his Chinese-Chicano experience and, on the other, broadly symptomatic of an increasingly globalized world.
Thus, Stories on my Back embodies what cultural studies scholars Kit Dobson and Áine McGlynn identify as “the desire to advocate for artistic agency at a time when globalizing forces are increasingly calling for economic rationalizations for creative practices.” Latorre will therefore argue in this presentation that Stories on my Back eloquently speaks of the critical connections between the Chicana/o and Chinese experiences in the U.S., connections that represent viable forms of transnational resistance to the homogenizing and subordinating forces of globalization.
Guisela Latorre, Associate Professor, Ohio State University Department of Art
Guisela Latorre specializes in modern and contemporary U.S. Latina/o and Latin American art with a special emphasis on gender and women artists. Her first book titled Walls of Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals from California (U. of Texas Press 2008), explored the recurrence of indigenist motifs in Chicana/o community murals from the 1970s to the turn of the millennium. Her other publications include “Border Consciousness and Artivist Aesthetics: Richard Lou’s Performance and Multimedia Artwork” in the American Studies Journal (2012), “New Approaches to Chicana/o Art: The Visual and the Political as Cognitive Process” in Image & Narrative (2010), and “Icons of Love and Devotion: Alma López’s Art” in Feminist Studies (Spring/Summer 2008). Latorre’s recent research activities include the co-editorship of the feminist journal Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies and work on a second book project of the graffiti and mural movement in Chile during the post-dictatorship era. She teaches classes on Latina/Chicana feminism, visual culture and Latina/o art.
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Crosstown Arts is a contemporary arts organization dedicated to further cultivating the creative community in Memphis. Managing five types of spaces that integrate varying components of exhibition, performance, production, education and retail, Crosstown Arts supports multidisciplinary and collaborative projects that interconnect people and organizations. We welcome anyone in the community to join any of our events or projects, regardless of prior experience or expertise with creative interests.
Centro Cultural Latino de Memphis strives to meet the needs of the community by celebrating and promoting awareness of our cultural richness and diversity interpreted through the literary, performing, and visual arts. Our primary goal is to preserve our respective rich Latino cultural heritage and to stimulate intergenerational dialogues among the disciplines, languages, and traditional and contemporary expressions.
