Throughlines: Social Injustice and Activism Los Angeles

Art

Image of ASCO's work, "Instant Mural." First Supper (After a Major Riot)/Instant Mural. In the first piece ASCO created dinner table decorated with paintings of tortured corpses, a large nude doll, and mirrors on a traffic island on Whittier Boulevard, where three years earlier the police opened fire with shotguns on an assembled crowd. ASCO prepared a celebratory feast designed to encourage people to express themselves publicly, so as to contest the paramilitary police occupation of their neighborhood. At the end of the supper Asco performed Instant Mural. Gronk taped Patssi Valdez and Humberto Sandoval to a wall by a bus stop. The pair ignored passersby who offered to help untangle them. After an hour, Valdez and Sandoval walked away from the scene as if nothing had happened. ASCO was an East Los Angeles based Chicano artist collective, active from 1972 to 1987. Photograph by Harry Gamboa Jr. Los Angeles Times.

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