Week 8: Carmen Lomas Garza

At first glance I quickly derided Carmen Lomas Garza's work due to its demure outward appearance. What I had not noticed was Garza's subversion ability. Most activist work is confrontational--it tends to make exclamations so as to draw attention to its intended subject. Rather than reminding the world of the plight of the Chicana/o experience, Garza's work celebrates the jubilation of her life. By doing so she is able to talk about the Chicana/o experience through a positive lens, capturing serendipity in her images.

My favorite piece by Garza is Tito's Gig on the Moon. The image is one of her more self-less pieces in that it's not about her experience, but more about Tito's wishes. This piece illustrates many facets of Garza's artistic practice: not one character (for the most part in any of her pieces) is more important than the rest, in particular her group scenes make it difficult to discern the most important characters if there are even any; if you zoom in on any subject in her images, there is an independent story going on that branches off of the main idea (for instance, each pair of dancers is doing their own dance while as a whole the dance floor is animated); everyone is significant--it's as if Garza acknowledges that lives are not lived alone, instead everyone and everything with whom and which we come in contact are the sources of our joys. It's as if life is a song and everyone in her life (or in this case, Tito's afterlife) is an instrument that helps build the melody.

In terms of "capturing serendipity" I'm referring to Garza's isolation of events and furthermore isolating the smaller events within the big event that made the big event a great event. That said, not all of the events would typically be considered "big" events (like an afternoon on the porch eating watermelon). Some events that she depicts may seem trivial or banal, but then those pieces become less about the event itself and more about the beauty that she remembers about similar events, and she illustrates this by capturing the spirits of all those involved, and her memory of joy becomes the subject of all of her pieces--this is Garza's confrontation against belittlement of the Latina/o experience in America.