“NO CRUISING,” the street sign warns tersely. “Two times past same point within six hours is cruising,” it continues, for anyone who might even think of getting lost or going for the simple pleasure of taking a leisurely drive. Beckoning us in with the promise of the forbidden, Guadalupe Rosales’ work No Cruising (Whittier Blvd) (all works 2023 unless otherwise noted) is an ironic welcome sign, worn in with a slight bent, near the entrance to ‘Sitting on Chrome’ at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The group exhibition is a collaboration between friends and Los Angeles artists Rosales, Mario Ayala and rafa esparza and is dedicated to Southern California’s rich artistic legacy of using the lowrider car as a space of celebra- tion in traditionally Latinx communities.
Titled after Masta Ace Incorporated’s 1995 song “Sittin’ on Chrome,” this story is told in several chapters, beginning with an archive display of zines collected by Mario Ayala, including issues of the San Francisco-based Mi Vida Loca, documenting generations of Chicanx life; Teen Angels, which published Chicanx art and texts, including writers who were imprisoned or had gang affiliations; and Rosales’ Los Angeles Chicano Archive, a continuous project dating back from the 1970s, shown alongside a stack of box monitors playing found video footage from parties and lowrider meetups in the ’90s.
Collecting these bits of personal and communal history is at the core of Rosales’ practice, with a studio in Boyle Heights, East L.A., dedicated to housing an endless sweep of both her own photographs as well as recovered film shots, snippets of video and audio, and printed matter such as party flyers. All of this is documented with great care and made accessible on two viral Instagram accounts: @VeteranasandRucas, or veterans and girls, or girlfriends, with images of young women and their loves across Southern California, and @MapPointz, a timeline of ’90s party crew culture named after a public meeting point. Revelers would go to meet an intermediary who would pass them a slip of paper with the event’s exact location, a system that would keep it a clandestine, but still open, night.
Mario Ayala also collects similar primary-source material, using the imagery and materiality of Latinx Californian culture to pay tribute to its icons. The painter grew up in California’s Inland Empire, the stretch between Los Angeles and Palm Springs that birthed NASCAR’s Auto Club Speedway (ACS) and has acted as a center of hot rod culture. He also pulls from the Funk art movement he was exposed to while a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, car culture in general, tattoo design, murals and historical movements like L.A.’s Cool School of the 1950s and ’60s. All of this informs his brilliantly hued airbrushed acrylic portraits of West Coast heroes and vernacular aesthetic traditions. This is seen in works such as his self-portrait Reunion (2021), where the artist seems to be shrinking until his final form as a cockroach, referring to both Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The ways that immigrants have been portrayed are encircled by scenes from Diego Rivera’s SFAI mural The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, burritos and bottles of BuzzBallz premixed cocktails, and Gypsy Rose (2017), the artist’s barbecue grill painted in pink and roses to resemble the legendary 1960 Chevy Impala known as the queen of lowriders.
Many of rafa esparza’s performances take place outside the traditional stage for contemporary art, activating public parks, nightclubs and streets instead. Retooling the double meaning of the word cruise to expand upon both living Mexican American heritage and queer community, esparza’s work is a hybrid of generational history and restless future that more closely represents his world and family. For his work Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser (2022), the artist refashioned a quarter-operated children’s car ride into a physical part of himself, reincarnated as a cyborg for Art Basel Miami Beach. In the spirit of collaboration and family, his guests were invited to mount the “ride” while they listened to a recording of esparza describing the work—one based on a 2018 version where Ayala painted esparza to also resemble Gypsy Rose, adding Cyclona, a performance artist and revolutionary drag queen in East L.A. Corpo sits between esparza’s own self-portrait, painted in acrylic on ancestral adobe, and Rosales’ Drifting on a Memory (a dedication to Gypsy Rose, a wall inlay work roughly the length of a car and upholstered in fuchsia and imperial blue velvet and adorned with the fuzzy dice, bandana, disco ball and fresh roses a lowrider might need). All three artists collaborated on elements of the exhibition, including Entre Mundos (Between Worlds), an overlapping of the trio’s visual references, wrapping around the gallery walls, as well as ‘Gravitron’, a room-sized installation of flickering rainbow lights and car speakers mimicking the experience of being in such a car—a transcendent ride whose true enchantment could be the friends who get in with you.