L.A. Delivery Man Amassed One of the World’s Largest Collections of Chicano Art
*I love stories that uncover gems like this: “He started it “on a shoestring” at age 16, paying a few dollars down and a few dollars a week for pieces that he found in local galleries.” VL
By Amy Rappport, Artsy
In the fall of 2000, the Santa Monica Museum of Art hosted “East of the River: Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous,” an exhibition surfacing several sprawling collections of Chicano-made ceramics, paintings, and works on paper. (Chicano/a is a term for a Mexican-American that has politically radical origins in the Latino branch of the civil rights movement, which largely took place in the Southwest.) All seven of the private collections that contributed work to the show were otherwise permanently on view in the collectors’ respective homes. Two of those homes were partially recreated for the show—furniture, rugs, and all—in order to display the art in its usual habitat. “Like home movies,” the Chicano studies scholar Alicia Gaspar de Alba wrote at the time, these collections “reflect and display the identity of the people that reside in the home as much as the work of the artists.”
[pullquote]Serrato’s bedroom is too crowded with work to allow for a bed, so he sleeps on the floor.[/pullquote]It is hard to imagine that there is someone who brings this theory to life more vividly than Enrique Serrato, a 74-year-old Los Angeles county native whose 6,600-object collection currently lives in his modest two bedroom apartment in the city of Whittier, 12 miles southeast of Downtown L.A. When I visited him there earlier this month, on one of southern California’s infamously searing early autumn days, the sunlight in the shade-free San Gabriel Valley was bright, blunt, and beige.
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[Photo by Emily Johnston, Artsy]
