In the late 1960s, four young Chicano artists in East Los Angeles began collaborating in various combinations, eventually forming an art collective and taking the name Asco - as in 'me da asco' or 'it (your art) disgusts me'.

One evening in 1972, three of its members - Harry Gamboa Jr, Gronk (aka Guglio Nicandro) and Willie Herrón III - signed their names to the entrance of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), claiming the public institution as their own private creation and thus making the world's largest work of Chicano art in the affluent and white mid-Wilshire area of the city.¹ Spray Paint LACMA (1972), sometimes later referred to as Project Pie in De/Face, was conceived in response to a LACMA curator's dismissive statement that Chicanos made graffiti not art, hence their absence from the gallery walls. In other words, 'Chicano art' was a categorical impossibility.

In signing the museum, Asco collapsed the space between graffiti and conceptual art, at once fulfilling the biased thinking that justified their exclusion and refiguring the entire museum as an art object itself, in accordance with the terms of institutional critique that were being developed at the time. Because the signed museum could not possibly fit within the museum gallery walls, it became the objective correlative for that categorical impossibility of Chicano art, the very condition that the institution helped to sustain. With Spray Paint LACMA, Asco made briefly visible the fact that the public mission of the institution - to be representative - was at odds with the aesthetic criteria that determined the curatorial agenda and thus what was installed on the interior walls.