Existing comment:
Seymour Rosen
born Chicago, IL 1935–died Los Angeles, CA
2006
Photographs of Asco's Stations of the Cross 1971, printed2019
three gelatin silver prints
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Frank K. Ribelin Endowment
Stations of the Cross was a walking "ritual of resistance" against what the performance group Asco considered the "useless deaths" taking place in Vietnam. The male members of the group (which originally comprised Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez)paraded down Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, with Herrón as a Christ/death figure bearing a large cardboard cross. The quasi-Passion Play ended with the trio blocking a U.S. Marines recruiting office with the cross, symbolically halting military recruitment from their Mexican American neighborhood. One year earlier, Whittier Boulevard had been the site of the National Chicano Moratorium March -- the largest war protest organized by a minority group, and one that called out the disproportionate burden borne by Americans of color on the front lines. |