W8: Carmen Lomas Garza

The art works of Carmen Lomas Garza is important to acknowledge given that she commemorates and almost historicizes our cultural traditions. Often the traditions in our culture are seen as questionable or pointless in the eyes of outsiders and CLG challenges those notions as one of the artistic curators of culture and she further delivers clear images with complex sets of colors. In Garza’s piece, Earache Treatment, the healing process is captured with the mother letting ashes fall into the ears of the other person. This piece resonated with me because of the many earaches I had growing up. The guy has a calm look to his face and it might have been because the treatment was starting to work but I do remember the excruciating pain that plagued the insides of ears sending sharp waves of pain to my head. It’s a piece that reminds me of my great grandmothers, grandmother, and my own mother’s herbal medicines. My early memories of these ancestral traditions were ones where I would question why they would put leaves in my ears but the overnight treatment never failed to work. Similar cultural healing practices range in methods but they exist and Carmen Lomas Garza challenges viewers to take a longer look at the art behind it.