HUMANSCAPES 

No. 94  - 150  (1978-1989)

72 X 96 in  (183 X 244 cm) 

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The final phase of the Humanscape series spans paintings 94 through 150, produced between 1978 and 1989. This period divides into two overlapping concerns: an art-historical dialogue with Western painting traditions, and a sustained critique of the Southwestern cultural clichés that shaped — and distorted — popular images of the American Southwest and its Mexican and Indigenous inhabitants. In the art-about-art works, Casas quotes and reframes canonical Western images, placing them within his cinematic screen format to question whose culture gets elevated to "high art" and whose gets reduced to tourist merchandise. In the Southwestern Clichés paintings, he examines imagery saturating Texas and New Mexico gift shops and regional advertising — images that simultaneously romanticize and erase living Chicano and Native American communities. Humanscape 141, "Barrio Dog" (1987), belongs to this final phase and is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, acquired in 1998.