SDSU Imperial Valley exhibition honors Armando Rascón and the spirit of border activism
IMPERIAL VALLEY, Calif. (KYMA) – SDSU Imperial Valley’s Steppling Art Gallery kicks off the new academic year with a powerful new exhibition celebrating Chicanx culture and local history.
The exhibition, titled “Proof of Concept: Retrospecting the Ephemeral and Activist Art of Armando Rascón,” is completely free and open to the public on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 9:00 to 11:30 a.m., through October 1.
The showcase features the retrospective and activist art of Calexico native Armando Rascón, whose decades of work explore border community identity while highlighting local political history.
“The practice of Armando Rascón…he’s been considered a pioneer of Chicano conceptual artists,” said Luis Hernandez, Director of the John H. Steppling Art Gallery. “A conceptual artist is an artist who works more with ideas rather than objects.”
For Rascón, bringing this comprehensive retrospective back to the Imperial Valley represents a profoundly personal milestone.
“It’s super interesting because I’ve had an awareness of everything here since childbirth basically, my earliest years,” Rascón shared. “I wanted to appropriate myself, my history, my cultural history, our story.”
The gallery exhibition ties directly into a companion book that spans five decades of Rascón’s career from 1976 to 2026.
The book uncovers the hidden stories and behind-the-scenes photography of his creative process.
Strikingly, much of the exhibition serves as a moving memorial to art that has physically vanished over the years.
“The book that I published…the last chapter in the book is this: Works that don’t exist,” Rascón explained.
Visitors will see fabric flags hanging on the gallery walls, which represent these lost historical pieces.
“What we have in this exhibition are flags that represent works that he did in the past that no longer exist because of different reasons—because they were ephemeral or temporary artwork,” Hernandez said.
Locally, Rascón is celebrated as the lead artist for the famous “Border Metamorphosis Mural Project.”
The original, large-scale public work took four years to complete and brought together more than 2,000 volunteers between 1998 and 2002.
Though the physical border fence and the canvas have since been replaced and destroyed, Rascón insists that the true spirit of the project can never be erased.
“These are things you can’t control, so I still want to celebrate that piece,” Rascón said. “To me, the fact that the community got together, and there was so much collective memory in having contributed to that, changes the tone of public art from being a passive consumer of culture to an active participant in the production of the art.”
The fabric displays function as a “memento mori,” which means a reminder of impermanence, but they double as a metaphor for a career that stays alive through public domain records and community impact.
“These are works that don’t exist except in the existing memory, and I think that’s a really good place to be if you look back on a career of 50 years,” Rascón added.
Ultimately, Rascón believes that grit and unfiltered truth are what define the Chicanx art movement. He encourages the Imperial Valley community to visit the gallery and form their own personal interpretations of the history on display.
“I would say that the history of Chicano art is sweat equity…where it’s just your ability to have backbone, grit, conviction, and truth, and you wander your own history,” said Rascón. “You don’t have to balance and falsify it.”
What: “Proof of Concept: Retrospecting the Ephemeral and Activist Art of Armando Rascón” Where: John H. Steppling Art Gallery, SDSU Imperial Valley (720 Heber Ave, Calexico, CA 92231) When: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. (Running through October 1) Cost: Free and open to the public. Parking: Public parking is available in the lot off East Sherman Ave and surrounding streets.Click here to follow the original article.