“It took me moving to New York to really kind of come into focus about my identity as being Chicano,” Terrill once said. A Los Angeles native, the artist vividly felt the loss of his queer and Chicanx activist communities when he briefly lived in New York in the early 1980s. This moment of uprootedness resulted in the Chicanos Invade New York Series, an act of self-representation and self-affirmation. Autobiographical images are coupled with ironic subtitles pointing to poignant moments of cultural clash and displacement, from a lack of tortillas in New York grocery stores to the absence of Chicanx artists in museums.
Gallery label from 2022