SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Ruiz-Healy Art announced the representation of Mexican American artist Frank Romero. A pioneer of the Chicana/o art movement, Romero (born in 1941 in Los Angeles) is among the earliest and most influential participants. Romero’s visual explorations of Chicanidad are cornerstones of this period in art history, which arose from El Movimiento, the social and political civil rights movement that began in the early 1970s.

The gallery recently presented Romero’s work in two concurrent solo shows curated by Rafael Barrientos Martinez at our galleries in New York City and San Antonio, TX. RHA will also feature Romero’s works on paper at the upcoming Cleveland Fine Print Fair and McNay Print Fair.

Throughout his over 60-year career as an artist, Frank Romero has been a dedicated contributor to the Los Angeles arts community. As a founding member of the 1970s Chicano art collective, Los Four, Romero and fellow artists Carlos Almaraz, Beto de la Rocha, and Gilbert “Magu” Luján helped define and promote new Mexican American awareness through murals, publications, and exhibitions at the peak of multiple political movements such as El Movimiento. Los Four's historic 1974 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) marked the country's first show of Chicano art at a major art institution.

Pulling together a diverse cast of signs and symbols to invent a visual language reflective of the multiculturalism that is at the core of the community, Romero drew from both his immediate surroundings of Los Angeles as well as iconographies related to the American Southwest, from where Romero traces part of his ancestry. Romero uses various mediums, such as paintings, murals, neon, and sculptures, to explore narratives within the Chicano experience, Latin American heritage, and American pop culture, providing insight into his experiences as an artist and a Mexican American in East LA.