Louis Carlos Bernal Gallery   

The Gallery will be closed for the summer:
May 13 - August 22, 2005

Louis Carlos Bernal was born in 1941 to a working class family in Douglas, Arizona.  He grew up in Phoenix, served in the Army, worked his way through Arizona State University, and graduated with a MFA in photography.  He was the first in his family to obtain a higher education.  Lou moved to Tucson in 1972 after accepting a full-time teaching position at Pima Community College.  This was a crucial transition in his life, he noted: “during the physical move I also began a spiritual move back to the barrio, and to a new attitude toward life— Chicanismo."  In Tucson, Lou formulates the motives that will inspire his mature photographs.  As he reflected upon the passions that colored his perceptions, he observed: Mexican-American is the term used to describe a person who is of American birth but whose cultural soul derives from Mexico.  This dual reality has been a burden which has clouded our identity.  Chicanismo allows us to accept our history but also gives us a new reality to deal with the present and the future.  To be a Chicano means to be involved in controlling your life.  Chicanismo represents a new sense of pride, a new attitude, a new awareness.  The Chicano artist cannot isolate himself from the community, but finds himself in the midst of his people, creating art of and for the people.  My images speak of the religious and family ties that I have experienced as a Chicano.  I have concerned myself with the mysticism of the Southwest, and the strength of the spiritual and cultural values of the barrio.  His accomplishments in the 1970s and 1980s brought him to international recognition.  He received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and major grants from the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, Polaroid Corporation, and the Awards in the Visual Arts administered by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art.  Bernal's photographs are included in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography, the Oakland Art Museum, the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and numerous private collections.  He had more than forty exhibitions of his work.  He collaborated with Patricia Preciado Martin on the book Images and conversations: Mexican Americans Recall a Southwestern Past, published in 1983 by the University of Arizona Press.  In 1984 Bernal was selected along with nine other photographers nationally to document the summer Olympics in Los Angeles. 

On October 24, 1989, Lou was riding his bicycle to work at Pima College and was struck by a car.  Lou never regained consciousness and was in a coma for four years.  He died on his 52nd birthday, August 18, 1993.  His first grandchild had been born just a few hours earlier.  Lou is survived by his mother Enedina, brother Rey, daughters Lisa and Katrina, and three grandchildren, all of whom live in Phoenix.