Frank Romero: California Dreaming at the Luis de Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles
- LA Art Documents
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Frank Romero: California Dreaming
Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles, CA
September 13 – October 25, 2025
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Frank Romero: California Dreaming, a solo exhibition featuring new paintings alongside seminal works, including painted and neon sculptures—a new milestone in the celebrated Chicano artist’s six-decade career. The exhibition will span Galleries 1 and 2 and run from September 13 to October 25, 2025, with an opening reception on Saturday, September 13, from 4:00-7:00 p.m.
Dreams are fertile ground for myths, icons, and symbols. They chart surreal journeys through hope and fear, past and future—an emotional terrain we’re left to interpret upon waking. California itself, a storied land of dreamers from across the globe, continues to inspire Chicano art pioneer Frank Romero. Throughout his prolific career, Romero has cultivated a visual vocabulary that embodies shared experiences, pride, notions of identity, home, belonging, and the many complexities and joys of Chicanx life, resonating with Angelenos and beyond.
Frank Romero: California Dreaming invites viewers to a nighttime drive—from the glimmering boulevards of Hollywood to the vast openness of the Sonoran Desert, which straddles both the Northwest of Mexico and the American Southwest. Through abstracted nightscapes illuminated by Romero’s signature expressionist color palette, galvanized by bold brushstrokes, iconic vintage cars cruise beneath starry skies and glowing neon, driving past palm trees, saguaros, and landmark symbols of Los Angeles’ cinematic golden age—the Brown Derby, the Cinerama Dome, and the Chinese Theater.
Frank Romero (b.1941, Los Angeles, CA) is among the most influential pioneers of the Chicano Art Movement. Romero employs various media—including painting, neon, sculpture, and murals—to explore narratives related to the Chicanx experience, Latin American heritage, and American Pop culture. Pulling together a diverse cast of signs and symbols to invent a visual language reflective of the multiculturalism at the core of the Chicanx community, his works provide insight into his life as both an artist and a Mexican American from East LA. Romero has spent his life traveling, living, and working between Los Angeles, New York, New Mexico, and France, which has expanded his ideas of identity and Chicanidad (Chicanx identity) beyond urban settings or the complexities of a single city.
