By Ryan Kost – Datebook|SFChronicle.com – Photo: Liz Hafalia|The Chronicle.
Photo: René Yañez, who passed away earlier this year, was a founder of the Galería.
More than a dozen Chicano artists brought the Galería into being in 1970. They spent two years in a place on Valencia Street before settling into the storefront on 24th Street, $75 a month for a gallery full of squatters with walls full of holes. The artists made their own space when they found no room for Chicano art, Chicano culture, Chicano ideas on the tall white walls of so many art institutions. Before his death earlier this year, René Yañez, the space’s first artistic director, spoke about how the Galería and the movement came from the community’s deep need “to create our own symbols, our own iconography.”
