CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/14/2019

Mind-flexing 'Mundos Alternos' opens at the Queens Museum

Claudio Dicochea's 2010 painting, (of Supreme Governance and Chief Saddle Blazing, it turned into a Martian), is reproduced from Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas, published to accompany the traveling exhibition on view at the Queens Museum through August 18. Important and refreshing for a variety of reasons, including the subject—the intersection of art and science fiction—and the list of artists—Chicano, Latino and Latin American artists from across the Americas—this book does an excellent job of critiquing the known-knowns while inciting the reader to imagine new realities, both utopian and dystopian. "Dicochea draws on eighteenth-century colonial casta (caste) painting in his work," Rudi Kraeher writes. "Casta paintings depict mixed-race families and functioned as visual taxonomies of racial hierarchy. Departing from historical casta paintings, Dicochea creates his own postmodern portraits of mestiza families. Through a technique of re-appropriation and visual sampling, Dicochea creates unique, hybridic characters. A key element of this collage-like process is what Dicochea calls the 're-racing' of his figures: darkening or lightening the skin tone of the people he portrays."