A new exhibit at the Monterey Museum of Art is helping establish the legacy of Latinx art.

It started in 1982, when UC Santa Cruz professor and artist Eduardo Carrillo created a conference called Califas: Chicano Art and Culture in California, to discuss how far decades of Chicano social and political movements have come. It was a convergence of artists like himself, but also scholars and social thinkers. Almost 40 years later, his legacy and the discourse continue – and it’s not just because his name is on the only artist-endowed museum in the U.S. dedicated to Mexican American art.

Carrillo – and the work of Latino artists of past decades – is survived by artists like CSU Monterey Bay’s Angelica Muro, Gilroy muralist Armando Franco and City College of San Francisco’s Amy Díaz-Infante and others featured in the exhibit The Califas Legacy Project. (“Califas” is a slang term for California created by Chicanos.)

Califas Legacy Project isn’t just one exhibit. It’s symposiums and events across the Monterey Bay involving conversation, documentary and art. Monterey Museum of Art is part of it, housing the visual exhibition Califas Legacy Project: The Ancestral Journey/El Viaje Ancestral.

The MMA exhibit, which runs until April 11, bridges the work of past Latino artists with those of the present. “Califas was a way to remediate a missing piece of American art history,” says Betsy Andersen, executive director of Museo Eduardo Carillo in Santa Cruz. Andersen and other partners came to an understanding that the legacy of Latino art is a larger piece of the fabric of art history than is currently represented.

Díaz-Infante, a Salinas native, is one of the artists whose work will be shown at MMA. She says people usually think of murals by Diego Rivera in the canon. Indeed, there will be Latino muralists represented in multiple forms (including a moveable mural depicting works of Califas artists printed by book artist Felicia Rice).

But Díaz-Infante says Latino art is more than murals. “When you think about the ‘canon’ it’s public-facing and loud,” she says. In contrast, her work explores the everyday spaces of Latinos and, in particular, the intimacy of the home, represented in her work by elements like doors, curtains and plates. “I wanted to explore these liminal spaces because that is what the immigrant experience is to so many people. It’s the neither-here-nor-there feeling.”

The concurrent exhibitions are a small piece in a larger movement for art museums and galleries to represent all facets of their communities. MMA and Díaz-Infante know that two exhibitions aren’t going to fix decades of low to no visibility of Latino artists, but it’s a step in the right direction.

“Things are changing. The population of California is changing,” Díaz-Infante says. “We don’t just want to see ourselves in Mexican-American museums, but in equal representation with other artists.”

To view the exhibit, visit montereyart.org.