However, as a "culturally-based" curator, I have often had to deal with the preconceived notion that U.S. Latino and Latin American art are a second class cultural production, a sub-category that (although we've gone a long way) is still often underrated by prejudiced expectations of traditional, baroque, and folk aesthetics. The "cultural idiosyncrasies" of Latin American art are often misinterpreted.

Last year at the Galerí­a we organized an exhibition titled, Out of Line: Chicano/Latino Drawings that featuredówith equal respectódrawing-based artwork created in different contexts and for different purposes. It brought together artists such as Felipe Erhenberg and Enrique Chagoya from Mexico, León Ferrari from Argentina, Chicana artist Ester Hernández, master printer José Antonio Suárez from Colombia, and so-called "underground" artists such as Paco Excel, Rafael Navarro, and Lalo López Alcaráz. The exhibition included everything from woodcuts and etchings to conceptual art, paños (a highly elaborate form of Chicano prison art), underground comics, tattoo designs and drawings etched on the human body. The selected works ranged from low rider aesthetics to gallery art inspired by Mexican and border pop culture, and from existential introspection to satirical commentary. This eclectic exhibition did not recognize artificial boundaries between the so-called "low" and "high" art worlds, nor between established and emerging artists. It also didn't recognize geo-political borders. It brought together artists living in Califas (San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, Monterrey, etc.) as well as in Latin America. Yet despite these apparently distant worlds, the connections between established artists and Chicano tattoo, pinto, and underground comic book artists exposed a series of affinities between "fine" art and "street" art; both extremes inspired by each other, two sides of the same coin. Certain images such as calaveras, luchadores, Aztec warriors, and Catholic symbols for example, reappeared consistently although they were adapted to reference individual meanings and specific contexts.

Paradoxically, the power of these icons is what has brought Chicano aesthetics to slip into the "alternative" mainstream through the back door. Chicano counter-culture imagery has become "fashionable" for the "alternative" sub-cultures of renegade gothic hipsters and urban primitives who often ignore or forget the source of their fascination.

LatinArt.com: Now letí­s talk about "high art"— generally thought of as the classical paintings and sculpture one finds in a fine art museum. If we take recent exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York as an example (The Art of the Motorcycle, The History of China, and Giorgio Armani), do you see this as a continuing trend for similar museums to begin incorporating popular culture or "low art" into their exhibition schedules? And if so, do you see this as a positive trend?

Carolina: In a culture where audiences depend on media hype and spectacle, museums are challenged to reinvent themselves and develop programs that have popular appeal. The marriage of the fashion industry to the art world, for example, can be seen as something culturally and aesthetically motivated. However, it is a marriage of convenience that brings the art world into the realm of the entertainment elite, and brings an "aura" of artistic enlightenment to the fashion industry. Although fashion often refers to street and fringe cultures such as Gaultier's stylized S&M and tattoo designs or Galiano's very controversial "Hobo Chic" inspired by "homeless fashion" óa very revealing oxymoronó its connection to popular culture is based on the mythologized hedonism of power, wealth, beauty, and success associated with entertainment socialites. A counterproposal to the Guggenheimí­s Giorgio Armani show could be the adventures of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York into the visual culture of female body builders, or the exhibition curated by Bill Arning exploring "gym culture." Here and there, art institutions are making attempts to erase the borders between fringe cultures and the mainstream. Stylized radical chic is very trendy now.