Los Artes Guadalupanos de Aztlán formed in the fall of 1971, when Samuel, Albert, and Carlos Leyba painted a mural of safari animals in the yard of a school in Santa Fe, only a couple miles but a world away from the plaza’s boutiques and the tony galleries of Canyon Road. The mural was a tribute to their twelve-year-old brother George, who had just died of an overdose. After they were done, the brothers managed to wrest $3,600 from the city to train clients of a local methadone clinic in art, and the ragtag group painted four more murals over the course of six weeks that riffed on Chicano motifs mostly culled from the pre-Cortés civilizations of Central America. The training program didn’t stick, but it had served to introduce the Leybas to Geronimo Garduño and Gilberto Guzman. A collective established, the artists began scheming about how to put into practice the ideas they had garnered from the work of Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, as well as the radical San Francisco publication
Raza Sí, Guerra No
Raza Sí, Guerra No
Raza Sí, Guerra No
Los Artes Guadalupanos de Aztlán formed in the fall of 1971, when Samuel, Albert, and Carlos Leyba painted a mural of safari animals in the yard of a school in Santa Fe, only a couple miles but a world away from the plaza’s boutiques and the tony galleries of Canyon Road. The mural was a tribute to their twelve-year-old brother George, who had just died of an overdose. After they were done, the brothers managed to wrest $3,600 from the city to train clients of a local methadone clinic in art, and the ragtag group painted four more murals over the course of six weeks that riffed on Chicano motifs mostly culled from the pre-Cortés civilizations of Central America. The training program didn’t stick, but it had served to introduce the Leybas to Geronimo Garduño and Gilberto Guzman. A collective established, the artists began scheming about how to put into practice the ideas they had garnered from the work of Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, as well as the radical San Francisco publication