Mundo Meza

"In an artistic career spanning roughly a decade and a half, Mundo Meza produced a distinctive and multidisciplinary body of work encompassing paintings, drawings, performances, and window displays. Born in Tijuana, Mexico, Meza grew up in East Los Angeles and later Huntington Park, California. In 1967 Meza met Robert Legorreta. While in their teens, the duo would parade down Whittier Boulevard in East L.A dressed in outrageous homemade outfits and made up to look like self-described “psychedelic glitter.” Meza and Legorreta soon met the artist Gronk and between 1969 and 1972 the three collaborated on a number of absurdist performances, ranging from private events to street interventions and highly inventive public spectacles. Sometimes Meza was a participant and he often acted as artistic director, designing costumes and doing the makeup for Legorreta—who adopted the persona Cyclona. Performances such as Caca-Roaches Have No Friends (1969), The Wedding of Maria Theresa Conchita Con Chin Gow (1971), and Cyclorama (1972) marked an early instance of queer visibility within the Chicano art and activist movements of East L.A.

In 1971 Meza met photographer Anthony Friedkin at the all-ages Gay Funky Dances at Troupers Hall in Hollywood. Friedkin photographed Meza and friends Jim Aguilar and Cyclona for his photo-series The Gay Essay that captured the era’s flowering gay youth culture. In 1973 the striking portrait of Meza with androgynous Aguilar, Mundo and Jim, Montebello, East Los Angeles (1972), appeared in the San Francisco-based underground newspaper Gay Sunshine. In the early 1980s Meza was photographed by experimental filmmaker and photographer Steven Arnold, posing for him on two occasions. In one series, styled with assistance by Meza, he is covered in clay, holding plastic heliconia flowers, and flanked on both sides by plastic cacti, a nod perhaps to both his indigenous heritage and Hollywood artificiality. In another, he appears in a fanciful clown costume. This image, The Wonder of Mundo Meza (1983), was reproduced in Arnold’s book Epiphanies (Twelvetrees Press, 1987).

Encouraged by Margaret Tange, his art teacher at Huntington Park High School, Meza enrolled at Otis Art Institute in 1973 to study painting. He received grants from the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Junior Chamber of Commerce. During this period, Meza began to combine Mesoamerican iconography, in line with the Chicano art movement’s interest in reclaiming cultural heritage and the concept of Aztlán, with surrealistic and psychedelic visual play. These works at times also pointed to drag culture, such as the colored pencil drawing Wig Shop (1975) or the painting Sweet (1975). In the early 1970s Meza also painted a series of portrait of rock stars, including David Bowie and Mick Jagger. An unpublished one-page biography on Meza complied by Legorreta states that after a showing of these paintings at the East Los Angeles Library in 1973, the works were stolen. One portrait of Jagger, painted as a full-length nude, can be seen in negatives from Friedkin’s The Gay Essay that remained unprinted prior to this exhibition."

- Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., organized by ONE Archives at the USC Libraries in collaboration with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, for Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.