SFMOMA’s ‘Sitting On Chrome’ Luxuriates in Going Low and Slow

It’s difficult to avoid punning when it comes to Sitting on Chrome, a highly polished three-person show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Works shine and sparkle — quite literally — in this wonderfully unrushed, materially evocative meditation on lowrider aesthetics and East Los Angeles history and culture.

The show, co-curated by Jovanna Venegas, Tomoko Kanamitsu and Maria Castro, brings together new and recent work by Los Angeles artists (and friends) Mario Ayala, rafa esparza and Guadalupe Rosales on the museum’s second floor. Continuing with the practice of keeping these galleries free (at least through the end of 2023), Sitting on Chrome welcomes visitors up from the Botta atrium with a frankly staggering display of decoration and finish.

On the show’s opening wall, imagery from all three artists (including an airbrushed cyborg mural from Ayala) is framed by custom pinstriping, faux silver leaf and lace stenciling courtesy of local sign painter and artist Lauren D’Amato. It’s museum wall as lowrider exterior, giving snippets of Ayala, esparza and Rosales’ distinct styles while framing them within a unified exhibition design, a preview of what’s to come in the four galleries that follow.

First we get a bit of background, courtesy of Ayala and Rosales’ own archives. In metal vitrines painted a shiny magenta, Ayala’s copies of Teen Angels and the San Francisco-based Mi Vida Loca open up to ads for Arik’s Workwear and hand-drawn illustrations, gesturing at the networks and communities that inform so much of the imagery we’re about to see. In the vitrine displaying Rosales’ Los Angeles Chicano Archive, a mirrored bottom cleverly allows viewers to see both the front and back of the ephemera displayed, including wallet-sized photographs with handwritten notes on their versos. Rosales has devoted much of her art practice to archiving, through the social media accounts @map_pointz and @veterana_and_rucas, Southern California women, music subcultures and community-created history.

If the first gallery is about context (a Whittier Boulevard “No Cruising” sign is planted at the entrance), the second is about bodies and machines. esparza’s Self Portrait, an acrylic painting on adobe, depicts the artist driving, his left arm hanging outside the car. But the arm’s metal, maybe chromed, just like the cast aluminum sleeves he created for Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser, a mechanical pony ride turned performative sculpture that esaparza activates with the help of friends.

In a short documentary produced by the museum, esparza tours viewers through Elysian Park, long a gay cruising zone that’s now being overtaken by a disc golf course. His dual understanding of cruising informs the structure and decoration of Corpo RanfLA, a sculpture that allows him to become a lowrider, but also speaks to a more harmonious future with technology, one that’s less about dependency than agency and hybridity.

Rosales’ contribution to this space is quieter, more melancholy: a large nighttime photograph housed in a delicately etched frame, showing a view from Elysian Park of Interstate 110. In the long exposure, the lights of a helicopter arc overhead, evidence of a car chase below. Cars mean mobility and freedom, customization and expression, but they can also become the targets of law enforcement; that tension between resistance and surveillance permeates the show.

But Rosales has also provided visitors with a window — a way of looking into the comfort of a space designed to resist external control. A wide slice of wall lined with magenta buttoned upholstery acts like the rear deck of a car, where fuzzy dice and a disco ball dangle. Through this view, we enter the interior space of the lowrider, a gallery with deep purple walls and velvety, hard-not-to-pet upholstery.

Here, we get two nods to San Francisco by way of Diego Rivera. esparza’s Alexa, a painting on adobe, is propped up by a steel armature that resembles (in a scaled version) the way Pan American Unity is supported downstairs. Beside it, Ayala’s Reunion is an homage to SFAI’s Rivera mural with an Animorphs-like self-portrait at its center, BuzzBallz and burritos floating around. (I demand a local institution acquire this work.)

The show’s final gallery goes even further “inside” with a hexagonal sonic sculpture that places visitors at the center of a powerful sound system. Created collaboratively by all three artists with help from eeba studio and Eddie Flores, it’s a futuristic and disembodied version of an experience one might have while cruising. In the room’s corner, Rosales’ low & slow places photographs around a spinning wheel, a woman hula-hooping at the spokes’ center. Leaning over this piece is like peering into a wishing well, an infinite reflection of both memories and possibilities.

The aesthetics of lowriders can be slick, almost machine perfect. But what Ayala, esparza and Rosales capture in their work, however shiny and well crafted, is the humanness of this desire to create a space of one’s own. In a cohesive display, the show achieves what the best customized cars accomplish: rubbernecking, in the best possible way. This work is not about speed. It comes from a deep knowledge of time and place, and shows how the layering up of that information can create complicated, nuanced ways of moving (ever so slowly) into the future.

‘Sitting on Chrome’ is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through Feb. 19, 2024. Related performances by rafa esparza will occur during the run of the exhibition. Check the museum’s website for details.