Neo-Chicanonismo in Abstraction, Surrealism, and Latinidad

Neo-Chicanonismo in Abstraction, Surrealism, and Latinidad is the second chapter of the LA Futurism – Summer Series, a curatorial journey examining contemporary painting in Los Angeles through Chicano legacy, futurism, and the ever-shifting visual languages of culture, memory, and resistance, reclaiming historically Eurocentric genres—abstraction and surrealism—and reshaping  them through lived experience, cultural memory, and migration.

This exhibition traces the influence of Chicano and Latinx artists on European-rooted movements—abstraction and surrealism—and how those genres have been reworked through migration, hybridity, and lived experience. Here, abstraction is no longer purely formal, and surrealism is no longer solely psychological; both become tools to reflect the layered realities of identity, displacement, and cultural inheritance.

As with earlier Futurist ideals—speed, transformation, rupture—these artists pull from the dynamism of contemporary life: technology, globalization, street culture, cinema, music, and digital memory. In doing so, they subtract, subvert, and add to the traditions they engage. No longer fixed to typecasts or narrow expectations, their work expands the grammar of painting into a transnational, post-Chicano language—one uniquely shaped by Los Angeles.

Long viewed as academic or elite, abstraction and surrealism have often excluded BIPOC makers from their legacy. But here in Los Angeles, these genres are transformed—infused with barrio sensibilities, ancestral echoes, street aesthetics, and the rhythm of daily life. In this iteration of LA Futurism, the work doesn’t mimic—it redefines.

These artists subtract, subvert, and remix the past to speak from the present. The result is a language not just of rebellion, but of quiet belief: the universal desire to be seen, and the right to create from the specificity of your story. In an age of global interconnectedness, the barriers between genres and identities continue to collapse. The work here speaks not only to Latinidad, but to something shared across boundaries—a belief that every personal truth, no matter how local or overlooked, carries global resonance. This is the heart of LA Futurism: demystifying dominant narratives, disrupting typecasts, and honoring the makers whose stories were never meant to be archived, but insist on being told.