Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present On The Edge, an exhibition of new and historical paintings by legendary Chicana artist and activist Barbara Carrasco. In a body of work that includes paintings, murals, posters, prints, and installation, Carrasco has honed her distinct visual language alongside a strong political voice over more than five decades in service of the dispossessed, overlooked, and under-valued. Her bold, concise compositions find antecedents in advertising broadsheets, Japanese prints, and the crisp lines of Pop art. Carrasco builds on these legacies in compositions that foreground the personal within the political, celebrating the people—both named and not—who make up the movement. This exhibition features new works that honor iconic figures and shine a light on the suffering of our current moment, alongside archival works that delve into the history of the movement and the artist’s own family history.

Born in El Paso, TX, in 1955, Carrasco moved to Los Angeles at a young age and grew up in the predominantly Latino and Black community of Mar Vista Gardens, near Culver City. Throughout a childhood surrounded by family and community yet marked by poverty, Carrasco nurtured artistic skills from a young age. The five panel Codex Carrasco painting, completed in the 1990s, reflects on this childhood. Life’s strange juxtapositions abound: nuclear anxiety communicated in Saturday morning cartoons; brightly colored, heavily processed brands available to those on government food assistance; a coveted Barbie pushing weight loss tips; and the pride of the first Catholic president alongside the destructive force of religious colonialism. Together with collaged elements highlighting personal achievements and family snapshots, this work serves as a kind of abstract self-portrait of the artist as a child, a codex to be deciphered. 

Carrasco earned a BFA in 1978 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she served as the first female editor of the campus newspaper La Gente, which had run covers featuring her drawings since before she was a university student. Carrasco met César Chavez at a rally on campus when she was just 19 years old, and went on to be a longstanding and integral member of the United Farm Workers movement, creating banners, posters, fliers, and murals for the organization for over fifteen years. Even outside her efforts for the movement, her work continually centers the struggle for civil rights. The installation piece BANG! pairs quotes and portraits from prominent activists on banners hung from the ceiling, provocatively bracketed by two illustrated pistols and cartoonish banners declaring BANG! The work’s implied violence could be turned inward or outward, depending on interpretation, and keeps the viewer on high alert.

The new works in On The Edge carry forward the clear, precise line, bold color, and compelling message of Carrasco’s UFW works in paintings celebrating powerful women in southern California politics, civil rights, and the arts. A large portrait of Dolores Huerta executed in vibrant pink and purple against a teal background anchors the exhibition. Huerta has been a friend and mentor to Carrasco dating back to the 1980s, and Carrasco carries her social justice work forward as a founding member and board member of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. Carrasco’s portrait of Huerta adopts the language of screenprinting—a medium so identified with civil rights movements and mass demonstrations—yet the scale of the canvas here allows for an immediacy that sets it apart. Especially now, with this series Carrasco reminds us that the movement is bigger than any one person, and lives on in anyone committed to improving lives of those around them.

Carrasco was a prolific muralist in her early career, working with many of California’s great streetscapers and leading mural projects for the UFW. In 1981, she was commissioned to muralize the history of Los Angeles for the city’s bicentennial. The result was L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective, an eighty foot long collection of historical scenes—from prehistoric creatures to native communities, the Mission system to the Zoot Suit Riots and Civil Rights marches—braided into the flowing hair of the figure of la Reina de los Ángeles. Based on meticulous archival research, Carrasco took the commission as an opportunity to highlight histories not included in the textbooks, instead centering the stories of immigrants, native communities, and low-income neighborhoods. When the commissioning body tried to censor over a dozen vignettes, Carrasco fought for and eventually won ownership of the mural and it was shown only rarely over the following four decades. In 2020, L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective entered the collection of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum and is now permanently displayed at the museum’s Exposition Park campus.

A new series of paintings brings this difficult history up to the present moment, as Carrasco continues to center the stores and figures of the dispossessed. The series of small works features portraits of children, the most vulnerable victims of the current administration’s cruel immigration policies. With her signature vibrant palette and spare sense of line, Carrasco memorializes the human cost of family separation and inhumane deportation, the innocence of these young children in stark contrast to the cruelty in which they’ve been caught up. Each child is accompanied by a monarch butterfly, a symbol of migration and hope. While some figures have been lifted from news images, others are modeled children in her life—emphasizing that this could happen anywhere. These portraits of detainees take on a new level of resonance when paired with portraits of Carrasco’s own daughter, as they are here. Throughout the exhibition, Carrasco captures moments on all sorts of metaphorical edges: the edge of safety, the edge of adulthood, the edge of victory, or the edge of transcendence.