Gronk

Gronk (born 1957 in East Los Angeles, California, USA) is the artistic name of Chicano painter and performance artist Glugio Nicondra. According to Gronk, his widely-repeated birth year of 1954 is false and directly attributed to his long-time dealer, Daniel Saxon, who wanted his young artist to "be older" and "taken seriously." The artist also states that "Gronk" is a name his Mother found in an article on a Brazilian tribe in National Geographic while resting shortly before his birth.

Radicalized politically by the Anti-Vietnam War and Chicano Walk-Out movements of Los Angeles schools, Gronk barely attended their final years in school, and may not have graduated. An autodidact by circumstance, he began his career as an urban muralist who had to look up the word “mural” to know whether he could paint one.

As a founding member of the East L.A. multi-media arts collective Asco (Spanish for nausea), in the 1970s, Gronk and his contemporaries responded to Hollywood’s rejection of Chicanos by creating a conceptual counter-cinema – alternately dubbed the “no movie” or “movie without film” – which incorporated Hollywood imagery and style even as it wickedly dissected the banality and biases of the mass media. In collaborations with Cyclona, Mundo Meza, Jerry Dreva, and Tomata DuPlenty, Gronk created farcical “happenings” that challenged the limits of sexuality, gender norms, and taste.

Over time, he has developed an international reputation for a provocative body of work, which includes painting, performance, photography, video, installations, opera sets, and computerized animation for panoramic screens. Gronk's paintings relate to the direct visual aesthetic contained in works by German Expressionist Max Beckman and the cartoon-like paintings of Phillip Guston, along with the visual lexicons of early American civilizations. Involved with theater since his teenage days in ASCO, his scenic work has been featured onstage with Latino Theater Company and East West Players, and he has created elaborate stage designs – often in collaboration with Peter Sellars – for opera companies including the Los Angeles Opera and Santa Fe Opera.

In 2003, Gronk was in residency at University of New Mexico as part of the Cultural Practice/Virtual Styles project. He was also given a career retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – the same arts institution where ASCO famously left its graffiti “tag” years earlier in protest against the official Chicano art of the group Los Four. Gronk currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.