Xican–a.o.x. Body examines influential artworks by artists who foreground the body as a site of political agency and imagination, artistic investigation, decolonization, and alternative forms of community. These artists possess multiple identities within and beyond the heterogenous, layered, and often contentious category of Xicanx. The exhibition emerges at the intersection of experimental artistic practices within the context of Xicanisma, a vital and inclusive concept developed in the 1990s from the historical lineage of the Chicano Movement’s key years in the 1960s and 1970s. Xicanisma amplifies the original Chicana/o calls for self-determination of ethnic, political, and cultural identities, but with greater acknowledgment of Indigenous roots, intersectional identities, and feminism. The exhibition includes the works of artists who identify in myriad ways—including Mexican American, Chicana/o, Xicanx, Indigenous, Latinx, Black, and Brown. The main themes of Xican–a.o.x. Body draw from the central component of the Brown Commons, where Brownness is articulated as a feeling and experience of people who exist within an “in-betweenness” and are thus read as other. This feeling offers the potential for individuals to be empowered through their difference and ultimately refuse, resist, and persist against the systems that harm them. Xican–a.o.x. Body features conceptual, experimental, and pioneering works from the late 1960s to the present using a diverse range of media— from poetry and ceramics to painting, photography, sculpture, film, performance, and tattoo drawings -that enlighten our understanding of Xicanx art and culture.

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