Biography

A legendary muralist, printmaker, performance artist, and painter, Gronk first carved a niche for himself in the underground culture of East Los Angeles during the 1970s. As a founding member of the art group Asco, Gronk helped to communicate the political message and activist spirit of the Chicano movement to the wider public. On the surface, Gronk’s distinctive paintings combine the bold graphic style of street graffiti with the passion of abstract expressionism. These characteristics, combined with Gronk’s complex vocabulary of symbols and images reveal his commitment to an art that is both outwardly daring and highly idiosyncratic.

Gronk was born Glugio Gronk Nicandro in 1954 in East Los Angeles and grew up in virtual poverty with his single mother who had given him the name Gronk—meaning “to fly” in a Brazilian Indian language. Gronk attended Garfield High School in East Los Angeles during the late 1960s, which at the time was a hotbed for political and social activism. At age 16 he dropped out of school and in 1972 helped to found the Chicano artist collective Asco (Spanish for “nausea”), along with classmates Patssi Valdez, Harry Gamboa Jr., and Willie Herrón. Together they organized art exhibitions, staged street performances, created videos, and performed live theater, all in response to the turmoil of urban Los Angeles life. “We were looking at everything in this urban environment,” explains Gronk. “It was a look at things about life in general, even our own history, like going to a school that had the highest dropout rate in the nation. That’s like nausea. Being told you’ll never succeed at what you ever do. … That caused nausea.”1

The Asco group also completed a series of collaborative mural projects that addressed the violence on the streets of East L.A. Often created quickly, in busy public spaces, the murals were widely viewed throughout the community. Although their work was undertaken in the spirit of renowned Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, it also incorporated contemporary influences ranging from pop culture to graffiti. “I didn’t go to galleries or museums,” Gronk once explained. “They weren’t a part of my childhood. But all I had to do was walk outside my front door to see visual images all around me. Graffiti was everywhere and it helped develop a sense for what I wanted to do.”2

As time passed, Gronk’s work became well known in the art world and he was invited by various museums to undertake on-site mural projects. The San Jose Museum of Art first asked Gronk to create a site-specific mural in 1992 on the interior walls of the Museum’s new wing.3 Three years later, Gronk returned to SJMA to paint Post, Library: Muse (1995) on a construction fence that was erected during a seismic retrofitting project.4 The title Post, Library: Muse refers to the past “lives” of the building, which had served as San Jose’s post office (1894–1933), the public library (1937–69), and finally the San Jose Museum of Art. The mural revealed how various historical layers often coexist and overlap in the same physical place.

Post, Library: Muse includes several of Gronk’s trademark icons, such as a table lamp, a martini glass, and a candle. Dominating the canvas is the dramatic female figure La Tormenta (the Spanish word for “storm”), who has appeared repeatedly in Gronk’s paintings since 1980. A femme fatale who always appears in an elegant black gown with her back to the viewer, La Tormenta’s identity is elusive and has led many critics to speculate that she may be the alter-ego of the artist himself. Perhaps it is her torment that results in Gronk’s dynamic arrangements of fragmented imagery and forceful line, which make his multifaceted paintings a challenge to decipher. “I like to create worlds for other people to enter,” Gronk once said of his paintings, “places where they can encounter their own imagination.”5 —A.W.

1. Gronk, quoted in Elson Carr, “Just Another Painter from East L.A.: Gronk Goes to LACMA,” LA Weekly, 18–24 March 1994. Asco’s most legendary “performance” was the illegal spray painting of their signatures on the doors of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to protest the exclusion of Chicano artists from that museum’s exhibition schedule. Twenty years later, Gronk was the first Chicano artist to have a solo exhibition at LACMA.
2. Gronk, quoted in Max Benavidez, “Chicano Art: Culture, Myth, and Sensibility,” in Cheech Marin, Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2002), 15.
3. The exhibition was titled Fascinating Slippers/Pantunflas, March 1992.
4. This public art project was undertaken in collaboration with the City of San Jose’s Office of Cultural Affairs.
5. Gronk, quoted in Max Benavidez, “How Do You Spell Gronk?” Los Angeles Times, 21 June 1992.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)


A legendary muralist, printmaker, performance artist, and painter, Gronk first carved a niche for himself in the underground culture of East Los Angeles during the 1970s. As a founding member of the art group Asco, Gronk helped to communicate the political message and activist spirit of the Chicano movement to the wider public. On the surface, Gronk’s distinctive paintings combine the bold graphic style of street graffiti with the passion of abstract expressionism. These characteristics, combined with Gronk’s complex vocabulary of symbols and images reveal his commitment to an art that is both outwardly daring and highly idiosyncratic.

Gronk was born Glugio Gronk Nicandro in 1954 in East Los Angeles and grew up in virtual poverty with his single mother who had given him the name Gronk—meaning “to fly” in a Brazilian Indian language. Gronk attended Garfield High School in East Los Angeles during the late 1960s, which at the time was a hotbed for political and social activism. At age 16 he dropped out of school and in 1972 helped to found the Chicano artist collective Asco (Spanish for “nausea”), along with classmates Patssi Valdez, Harry Gamboa Jr., and Willie Herrón. Together they organized art exhibitions, staged street performances, created videos, and performed live theater, all in response to the turmoil of urban Los Angeles life. “We were looking at everything in this urban environment,” explains Gronk. “It was a look at things about life in general, even our own history, like going to a school that had the highest dropout rate in the nation. That’s like nausea. Being told you’ll never succeed at what you ever do. … That caused nausea.”1

The Asco group also completed a series of collaborative mural projects that addressed the violence on the streets of East L.A. Often created quickly, in busy public spaces, the murals were widely viewed throughout the community. Although their work was undertaken in the spirit of renowned Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, it also incorporated contemporary influences ranging from pop culture to graffiti. “I didn’t go to galleries or museums,” Gronk once explained. “They weren’t a part of my childhood. But all I had to do was walk outside my front door to see visual images all around me. Graffiti was everywhere and it helped develop a sense for what I wanted to do.”2

As time passed, Gronk’s work became well known in the art world and he was invited by various museums to undertake on-site mural projects. The San Jose Museum of Art first asked Gronk to create a site-specific mural in 1992 on the interior walls of the Museum’s new wing.3 Three years later, Gronk returned to SJMA to paint Post, Library: Muse (1995) on a construction fence that was erected during a seismic retrofitting project.4 The title Post, Library: Muse refers to the past “lives” of the building, which had served as San Jose’s post office (1894–1933), the public library (1937–69), and finally the San Jose Museum of Art. The mural revealed how various historical layers often coexist and overlap in the same physical place.

Post, Library: Muse includes several of Gronk’s trademark icons, such as a table lamp, a martini glass, and a candle. Dominating the canvas is the dramatic female figure La Tormenta (the Spanish word for “storm”), who has appeared repeatedly in Gronk’s paintings since 1980. A femme fatale who always appears in an elegant black gown with her back to the viewer, La Tormenta’s identity is elusive and has led many critics to speculate that she may be the alter-ego of the artist himself. Perhaps it is her torment that results in Gronk’s dynamic arrangements of fragmented imagery and forceful line, which make his multifaceted paintings a challenge to decipher. “I like to create worlds for other people to enter,” Gronk once said of his paintings, “places where they can encounter their own imagination.”5 —A.W.

1. Gronk, quoted in Elson Carr, “Just Another Painter from East L.A.: Gronk Goes to LACMA,” LA Weekly, 18–24 March 1994. Asco’s most legendary “performance” was the illegal spray painting of their signatures on the doors of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to protest the exclusion of Chicano artists from that museum’s exhibition schedule. Twenty years later, Gronk was the first Chicano artist to have a solo exhibition at LACMA.
2. Gronk, quoted in Max Benavidez, “Chicano Art: Culture, Myth, and Sensibility,” in Cheech Marin, Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2002), 15.
3. The exhibition was titled Fascinating Slippers/Pantunflas, March 1992.
4. This public art project was undertaken in collaboration with the City of San Jose’s Office of Cultural Affairs.
5. Gronk, quoted in Max Benavidez, “How Do You Spell Gronk?” Los Angeles Times, 21 June 1992.

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