Gronk: The Artist
GRONK NICANDRO: CHICANO ART ICON
GRONK NICANDRO: CHICANO ART ICON
GRONK NICANDRO: CHICANO ART ICON
Glugio “Gronk” Nicandro (b. 1954) is a towering figure in American art—one of the most original and uncompromising voices to emerge from the Chicano art movement. For over five decades, he has forged a prolific and unpredictable career across painting, performance, conceptual art, theater, set design, and cultural critique. His work does
Glugio “Gronk” Nicandro (b. 1954) is a towering figure in American art—one of the most original and uncompromising voices to emerge from the Chicano art movement. For over five decades, he has forged a prolific and unpredictable career across painting, performance, conceptual art, theater, set design, and cultural critique. His work does not merely cross disciplines; it demolishes the barriers between them.
Raised in East Los Angeles by Mexican-American parents, Gronk was deeply shaped by the rich contradictions of barrio life: political protest and Catholic pageantry, lowriders and silent films, comic books and European expressionism. His mother, a librarian and activist, introduced him to a world of stories and images, including an article in National Geographic about a Brazilian tribe where the name “Gronk” appeared. He seized it. “It was an identity that I could take on and reinvent,” he said. “I didn’t want to be Glugio Nicandro, I wanted to be Gronk” .
As a young queer Chicano artist in 1970s Los Angeles, Gronk confronted a world that refused to see him. His response was radical: visibility through disruption. Along with Harry Gamboa Jr., Patssi Valdez, and Willie Herrón III, he co-founded Asco (Spanish for "nausea"), a conceptual performance art collective that turned the urban street into a stage and the body into a statement. “We weren’t accepted by the mainstream,” Gronk recalled, “but just to do the work was important” . Asco's guerrilla interventions, tagging LACMA, staging “No Movies,” performing absurdist rituals in traffic, were urgent, stylish, and subversive, exposing institutional erasure and media misrepresentation of Chicano lives.
When Asco disbanded in the mid-1980s, Gronk’s creativity only accelerated. He transitioned into solo work as a painter, channeling performance into brushstroke. His canvases burst with movement, ambiguity, and tension. His recurring figure La Tormenta, a gender-fluid being often seen from the back, emerged from his sketchbooks as a personal mythology of displacement and inner power. His imagery is not merely symbolic; it is theatrical, ritualistic, and deeply personal.
Gronk has never confined himself to canvas. In theater and opera, he has designed sets that turn performance into spectacle and critique. His collaboration with director Peter Sellars on Purcell’s The Indian Queen (2013) reimagined 17th-century opera as a postcolonial lament. He has brought that same energy to the Los Angeles Opera, the Santa Fe Opera, and university productions, often merging ancient myth with modern resistance.
What sets Gronk apart is his refusal to obey fixed categories—ethnic, sexual, artistic, or academic. “I didn’t need permission to be an artist,” he once said. “I just started doing it.” His murals, drawings, installations, and stage designs reflect an artist who sees no separation between rebellion and beauty, memory and invention, audience and author.
His work resides in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, LACMA, and The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, among others. In 2011, LACMA honored his Asco years in the retrospective Asco: Elite of the Obscure, and in 2025, his legacy was spotlighted in the SXSW-premiering documentary Asco: Without Permission, executive produced by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna.
More than an artist, Gronk is a myth-maker, a cultural agitator, and a living archive of Chicano resistance and queer futurism. He does not ask for space in the canon—he constructs his own stage, again and again, wherever he goes.
The stage is everywhere—
The art is Gronk.
Bibliography
- Oral History Interview with Gronk, 1997 Jan. 20–23. Conducted by Jeffrey Rangel. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
- Benavidez, Max. Gronk (A Ver: Revisioning Art History, Volume 1). UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2007.
- Chavoya, C. Ondine, and Rita Gonzalez, eds. Asco: Elite of the Obscure: A Retrospective 1972–1987. Hatje Cantz / LACMA, 2011.
Los Angeles Times Sources Cited or Consulted
- Johnson, Reed. “Soul Searching on Spring Street.” Los Angeles Times, April 1, 2001, E-1.
(Covers Gronk’s Spring Street studio and artistic transition after Asco) - Johnson, Reed. “They Were Here First.” Los Angeles Times, October 5, 2003, F-7.
(Discusses Gronk’s role as a foundational Chicano artist in contemporary L.A.) - Knight, Christopher. “The Two Lives of Gronk.” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1994, E-3.
(Reflects on his dual presence in the fine art world and the avant-garde underground) - Knight, Christopher. “Art Exhibitions Inc.” Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2004, E-33.
(Reviews a group show featuring Gronk's work and its lasting cultural relevance)
Chicano artist Gronk (Glugio Nicandro). Photo by Rush Varela.
EARLY LIFE AND INFLUENCES
GRONK NICANDRO: CHICANO ART ICON
GRONK NICANDRO: CHICANO ART ICON
From a young age, Gronk was captivated by pop culture, foreign films, and literature. His artistic sensibilities were shaped by European modernism, science fiction, and the vibrant street culture of Los Angeles. He began writing plays at 14 and performed his early work, Cockroaches Have No Friends, at East Los Angeles College. This perfor
From a young age, Gronk was captivated by pop culture, foreign films, and literature. His artistic sensibilities were shaped by European modernism, science fiction, and the vibrant street culture of Los Angeles. He began writing plays at 14 and performed his early work, Cockroaches Have No Friends, at East Los Angeles College. This performance led to collaborations with fellow artists Patssi Valdez, Harry Gamboa Jr., and Willie Herrón III, culminating in the formation of the avant-garde collective Asco in the early 1970s.
ASCO AND CONCEPTUAL ACTIVISM
GRONK NICANDRO: CHICANO ART ICON
ASCO AND CONCEPTUAL ACTIVISM
Asco, meaning “nausea” in Spanish, emerged as a radical response to the sociopolitical climate of East Los Angeles during the Vietnam War era. The collective utilized performance art, street interventions, and conceptual photography to challenge mainstream narratives and the exclusion of Chicano artists from major art institutions. Notabl
Asco, meaning “nausea” in Spanish, emerged as a radical response to the sociopolitical climate of East Los Angeles during the Vietnam War era. The collective utilized performance art, street interventions, and conceptual photography to challenge mainstream narratives and the exclusion of Chicano artists from major art institutions. Notably, in 1972, Asco members tagged their names on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in protest of the museum's dismissal of Chicano art as not being "fine art".