Rita Gonzalez is an American curator, author and media

artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating the work of art. The most common usage (in both everyday speech and academic discourse) refers to a practitioner in the visual arts o ...

. She is the head of the contemporary art department at

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 1961 ...

(LACMA), an institution she has worked at since 2004. Many of her curatorial projects involve under-recognized

Latinx ''Latinx'' is an English neologism used to refer to people with Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the United States. The term aims to be a gender-neutral alternative to ''Latino'' and ''Latina'' by replacing the masculine and fem ...

and Latin American artists.

Early life and education

Gonzalez grew up in Whittier, California, studied at

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of C ...

(UCSC),

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

(UCSD), and completed P.h.D. coursework in the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

(UCLA) film, television and digital media program on topics related to representation of

Chicano Chicano (masculine form) or Chicana (feminine form) is an ethnic identity for Mexican Americans that emerged from the Chicano Movement. In the 1960s, ''Chicano'' was widely reclaimed among Hispanics in the building of a movement toward politic ...

art in contemporary art discourse. In 2018, Gonzalez participated in the Center for Curatorial Leadership program, with Anne Pasternak as her mentor at the

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum in the New York City borough (New York City), borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heig ...

Career

From 1997 to 1999, Gonzalez served as the Lila Wallace Curatorial Fellow at the

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) is an art museum in La Jolla La Jolla ( , ) is a hilly, seaside neighborhood in San Diego, California, occupying of curving coastline along the Pacific Ocean. The population reported in the ...

. Gonzalez's curatorial oeuvre at LACMA includes ''Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement'' (2008), ''Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987'' (2011), ''L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists'' (2016), and ''A Universal History of Infamy'' (2018), a collaboration with

José Luis Blondet José is a predominantly Spanish and Portuguese form of the given name Joseph. While spelled alike, this name is pronounced very differently in each of the two languages: Spanish ; Portuguese (or ). In French, the name ''José'', pronounced , ...

and Pilar Tompkins Rivas. In 2017, Gonzalez served on the jury for the stand prizes of

Frieze Art Fair Frieze Art Fair is an annual contemporary art, contemporary art festival, art fair first held in 2003 in London's Regent's Park. Developed by the founders of the contemporary art magazine ''Frieze (magazine), Frieze'', the fair has since expan ...

.Sarah P. Hanson (4 May 2017)
Galleries showing historic feminist and politically minded artists win Frieze stand prizes
''

The Art Newspaper ''The Art Newspaper'' is a monthly print publication, with daily updates online, founded in 1990 and based in London and New York City. It covers news of the visual arts as they are affected by international politics and economics, developments i ...

''.

References

External links

*
Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement
' - book/exhibition catalog authored by Rita Gonzalez, Howard Fox and Chon A. Noriega
''Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement''
- 2008 exhibition at LACMA {{DEFAULTSORT:Gonzalez, Rita American art curators American women curators 21st-century American writers 21st-century American artists People from Whittier, California Living people Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century American women