Curator Notes
A pioneer of the Chicano art movement, Frank Romero explores the imagery of his native Los Angeles as well as of his Mexican and Spanish heritage in his art. In the 1970s Romero formed the artist collective Los Four, along with Carlos Almaraz, Gilbert Luján (aka Magu) and Roberto (Beto) de la Rocha; in 1974, they were the first Chicano artists to have their work shown at LACMA and in fact were the first Chicano artists to have an exhibition at a major institution anywhere in the United States. (Los Four soon included Judithe Hernández, thus becoming one of only two major Chicano artist collectives to include a woman.) As Romero described the collective in 2017, “Los Four—we were getting involved with the idea of being Chicano….We were very much involved in the cultural revolution that was happening at that time.”
In addition to the paintings for which he is best known, Romero also makes prints and brightly-colored ceramic sculptures. Starting in the 1970s if not earlier (Romero himself cannot remember exactly when), he began making small ceramic figures called pingos, including this untitled work, which was included in his second solo exhibition, at Oranges/Sardines gallery in Los Angeles in 1981. As Romero has described it, his pingos evolved out of his teaching ceramics to children at Plaza de la Raza in East L.A and at Barnsdall Junior Arts Center in Hollywood. After classes he would gather the discarded lumps of clay left by the students and make rectangular forms out of them, often adding bits of clay for heads, faces, and other details. According to Romero, he calls them pingos because he was making one and a young student at La Plaza asked what it was. Romero responded that he didn’t know what to call them but that they were mischievous spirits, to which she replied, “Oh, like pingos.” She went on to explain that in vernacular Spanish, a pingo is a horse-headed figure and/or a phallic form; it can also refer to a trickster or an impish spirit, among other meanings, all of which are appropriate for Romero’s creatures.
Small in size but radiating energy, this untitled pingo has multiple sources, according to the artist. It is related to Mesoamerican images of jaguars, particularly heads from Teotihuacan that Romero had seen with Almaraz in Mexico. It is also based on the cartoon figure Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, thus embodying both the “high” and the “low” cultural references that have long been formative for Romero.
Romero and fellow artist (and at the time his wife) Nancy Romero together created an installation in clay and wood titled Pingolandia. Exhibited in the 1980s and 90s in a number of iterations, this tabletop “landscape” included various pingos as well as architectural and geological elements. According to Nancy Romero in The International Review of African American Art (1992), Frank Romero “once observed that he always wanted to be a toymaker and this [Pingolandia] is the closest he has come to fulfilling that wish.” Pingos very similar to LACMA’s were included in at least one version of Pingolandia; it is unclear from known documentation whether this particular pingo was ever included or not.
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In addition to the paintings for which he is best known, Romero also makes prints and brightly-colored ceramic sculptures. Starting in the 1970s if not earlier (Romero himself cannot remember exactly when), he began making small ceramic figures called pingos, including this untitled work, which was included in his second solo exhibition, at Oranges/Sardines gallery in Los Angeles in 1981. As Romero has described it, his pingos evolved out of his teaching ceramics to children at Plaza de la Raza in East L.A and at Barnsdall Junior Arts Center in Hollywood. After classes he would gather the discarded lumps of clay left by the students and make rectangular forms out of them, often adding bits of clay for heads, faces, and other details. According to Romero, he calls them pingos because he was making one and a young student at La Plaza asked what it was. Romero responded that he didn’t know what to call them but that they were mischievous spirits, to which she replied, “Oh, like pingos.” She went on to explain that in vernacular Spanish, a pingo is a horse-headed figure and/or a phallic form; it can also refer to a trickster or an impish spirit, among other meanings, all of which are appropriate for Romero’s creatures.
Small in size but radiating energy, this untitled pingo has multiple sources, according to the artist. It is related to Mesoamerican images of jaguars, particularly heads from Teotihuacan that Romero had seen with Almaraz in Mexico. It is also based on the cartoon figure Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, thus embodying both the “high” and the “low” cultural references that have long been formative for Romero.
Romero and fellow artist (and at the time his wife) Nancy Romero together created an installation in clay and wood titled Pingolandia. Exhibited in the 1980s and 90s in a number of iterations, this tabletop “landscape” included various pingos as well as architectural and geological elements. According to Nancy Romero in The International Review of African American Art (1992), Frank Romero “once observed that he always wanted to be a toymaker and this [Pingolandia] is the closest he has come to fulfilling that wish.” Pingos very similar to LACMA’s were included in at least one version of Pingolandia; it is unclear from known documentation whether this particular pingo was ever included or not.