SAN FRANCISCO.- The de Young Museum opens the exhibit Armando Rascon: Naco Nocturnes through November 5. Armando Rascon is the final artist whose work will be displayed in the inaugural year of the new de Young’s Connections Gallery program. Exhibitions in this gallery emphasize the more intuitive connections on which artists typically rely and provide a model for visitors of the kinds of relationships that emerge when the collections are viewed with an eye toward common elements.

Working with the philosophical potential of installation art, Rascon uses museum and other personal artifacts as a platform to engage individual memories that redefine cultural perspectives. The visitor’s experience of museum artifacts will be reconfigured through video and soundscape, creating an awareness of how the US/Mexico border functions as a site of cultural definition rather than political division.

Armando Rascón lives and works in San Francisco. He was born in 1956 in Calexico, California, near the Mexican border. As a youth, he participated actively in the 1960s Chicano civil rights movement, including distributing literature for the United Farm Workers Union. After graduating from the University of California at Santa Barbara, Rascón settled in San Francisco and in 1988, founded the Terrain Gallery, an alternative space providing exhibition opportunities to artists who addressed issues specific to Northern California.

Rascón works in a variety of media, favoring photography, film, video, performance, and installation art. He is an interventionist who likes to work in public spaces. His most famous project is Border Metamorphosis: The Binational Mural Project, which is a two-mile mural painted from 1998 to 2001 directly on the US/Mexico border fence dividing Calexico, California and Mexicali, Mexico.