Artist, Joey Terrill: My name is Joey Terrill. What you're looking at here is a series called Chicanos Invade New York. It’s about portraying my sense of myself as a Chicano, meaning Mexican American from LA, as well as my gay identity.
The first one on the left is about how after a couple of months of being in New York City, I started craving tortillas. We searched and couldn't find them anywhere in stores. So I ended up having to make my own tortillas.
I have a poster of the play Bent up on the wall, which starred Richard Gere. Full disclosure—I had the biggest crush on Richard Gere and carried a little picture of him in my wallet. So I wanted to interject that part of my homosexual desire in this painting.
The middle painting, Reading the Local Paper, I was four blocks away when John Lennon was murdered, and that was a monumental event for me. I had this ominous feeling that the '80s were going to be very different. Sure enough by 1981, the first cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma and later AIDS were reported in The New York Times.
The painting on the right, Searching for Burritos, it's me, my sister, my friends. I posed us there standing in front of the Guggenheim. In the background you see an ice cream truck. So my idea was that, even though you're in the middle of a blizzard, you can still get ice cream, but you could not find a burrito to save your life.
Metaphorically, it was that we were looking for our identity, our stories, our art, and I didn't see any of that in the major museums in New York City.