Frank Romero

Frank Romero is an artist and muralist. He cofounded the Chicano artists collective Los Four, along with Almaraz, Gilbert Luján, and Roberto de la Rocha, in 1973. Romero and Almaraz first met in 1959, sparking a thirty-year friendship. This recollection is excerpted from an interview with Marielos Kluck, and had been edited and condensed for clarity.

In 1959, Carlos and I were both part of the first freshman class at California State College in Los Angeles, the first [four-year] college-level institution on the Eastside. […] I met him in a design class, along with everybody else, and the students were supposed to get up and introduce themselves—and we just sort of took a shine to each other. He was fascinating, a really good talker, an interesting guy.

He told me he wanted to be a commercial artist and go work for Walt Disney; he was very much familiar with the film Fantasia, which he just loved, and I said, “no, you don't want to be a commercial artist; you want to be a painter.” That was my goal; I was already an artist because I had [previously] been four years at Otis Art Institute. And he kind of accepted that—in fact, years later he did go to Otis in the ’70s […] so I created a monster, because the guy became a very famous painter! But we were very close.

 

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