Collected Writings of
Harry Gamboa Jr.

edited by
Chon A. Noriega

University of Minnesota Press

568 pages   
75 black-and-white photos

1998

Paper
ISBN 0-816630526   
$29.95

Cloth
ISBN 0-8166-30518
$74.95

The art of Harry Gamboa Jr. encompasses photography, video, performance, installation, essays, fiction, poetry, and lesser-known forms of his own creation. Working in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett, Gamboa has pioneered multimedia formats for nearly three decades.

Urban Exile gathers Gamboa's diverse creations in a visually compelling collection that reveals a rich vein of Chicano avant-garde production reaching back to the early 1970s.

Gamboa was a founding member of Asco (1972-1987), the East L.A. multimedia art group that critically satirized high art and cinema while parodying the utopian nationalism of the Chicano Arts Movement.  Urban Exile comprises works Gamboa created with Asco as well as solo efforts--Mexican fotonovelas rewritten as performance pieces, mail art, and No Movies (images presented as stills from nonexistent movies).  Firmly grounded in the megalopolis of Los Angeles, these texts present a unique perspective on the bizarre racialized and class-stratified fabric of that city--the "urban desert in ruins."

Gamboa's work is crucial to an understanding not only of Chicano art but also of the post-1968 avant-garde in the United States; he consistently debunks traditional categories, creates innovative alternatives, and reveals a history rendered invisible by the dominant art institutions and media industries.  Sometimes hilarious, sometimes dreamlike, always unexpected, these texts present a compelling critique of urban life at the end of the millennium and are essential reading for all "orphans of modernism."

Harry Gamboa Jr. lives in Los Angeles.  His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Biennial, and the Robert Flaherty Seminar.

Chon A. Noriega is a professor and the director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the editor of Chicanos and Film, and The Ethnic Eye, he is the author of Shot in America: Television, The State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema, all three published by the University of Minnesota Press.  

No story of Chicano art and politics is complete without Harry Gamboa Jr. and Asco. Each has played a central role in refiguring U.S. conceptual and performance art since the early 1970s.  And both are wickedly funny and savvy--always filled with surprises, always in-your-face, never predictable.  Urban Exile makes available for the first time the full range of Gamboa's brilliant and biting oeuvre.

Bryan Wolf
Professor of American Studies
Yale University

Harry Gamboa's art captivates, challenges, and enlightens.

Dolores Huerta
Secretary Treasurer
United Farmworkers of America

Harry Gamboa Jr. is, as Chon Noriega forcefully argues, a unique figure within both the Chicano community and the alternative arts.  The presentation of this rich archive of material challenges the too-often limited academic and museum-supported historical representations of conceptual, film, and performance art.  Gamboa's Asco projects and No Movies confront and contest the art world's redetermined parameters of art history and practice.  Urban Exile is an important resource:  I will return to it often.

John G. Hanhardt
Senior Curator of Film and Media Arts
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum