VIVA Records 1970-2000
VIVA Records: Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists of Los Angeles (2013) published by the UCLA CSRC Press is a 116-page book about the first lesbian and gay Latino artist organization in Southern California. In it, Hernández argues that VIVA, founded the same year as the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) in 1987, is precluded from AIDS literary and cultural history due to its complex allegiances to immigration politics, Latin American art, and exhibition practices outside major LA art institutions. Using GIS digital technology to theorize the “documents” of VIVA’s cultural activities, he spatializes the group’s exhibition history, mapping its profound reuse of the urban landscape for lesbian and gay Latino art beyond East LA. With an emphasis on place-making rather than the art documentation alone, he exposes ways in which queer minoritarian artists challenge and rework the relationship between art, evidence, and public space.