Office of External Communications

Houston, TX 77204-5017 Fax: 713.743.8199

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 27, 2006

Contact: Marisa Ramirez
713.743.8152 (office)
713.204.9798 (cell)
mrcannon@uh.edu

Latino art displays, conversations with Latino writers, and a Poetry Slam Encuentro are a few of the festivities at the Chicano-Latino Empowerment through the Arts Conference and Celebration. The event takes place Thursday and Friday, April 13 and 14, at the Hilton University of Houston Hotel.

Presented by the UH Center for Mexican American Studies, the event is free and open to the public.

“We hope to show the crucial role that the arts play in the overall development of the Latino community and how this expression conveys the broader Latino experience,” Lorenzo Cano, associate director of CMAS, said. “But mostly we want to celebrate Chicano and Latino art.”

Keynote speaker for the event will be Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, associate director for creativity and culture at the Rockefeller Foundation. Ybarra-Frausto is a retired professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University and a veteran of the Chicano movement. He has written extensively about Latino culture, in particular about the role of art in the development of community. He has donated his collections of Mexican and Chicano prints to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art and has served as an advisor to that museum on Latino cultural initiatives.

Other participants include sculptor Luis Jimenez; actress Ruby Nelda Perez; artist Joe Lopez and poet Raul Salinas, who will lead the Poetry Slam Encuentro (or Gathering) on April 13.

The Conference is also sponsored by Multicultural Education and Counseling through the Arts, Museo Guadalupe Aztlan and Talento Bilingue De Houston.

For more information about UH visit the university’s ‘Newsroom’ at www.uh.edu/admin/media/newsroom.