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.

Week 8: Carmen Lomas Garza

Carmen Lomas Garza is an amazing artist that has inspired me to touch on various themes of family, tradition and celebration in my art. She is known for art that celebrates and commemorates every day activities and traditions within our Chicano culture which can be seen in various of her pieces that capture quincianeras, family fiestas, comida, dance, and many past times that honor La Familia. I find myself to be attracted to the simplicity of the characters depicted in her art but also the extreme detail she places in her pieces as most capture a variety of happenings in one image.
One image I specifically enjoy is La Feria en Reynosa. I chose this image because it reminded me of some of the Ferias and traditional festivities that happen in Mexico. When I was in sixth grade and I made a trip to Michoacan I went to a lot of fairs,  traditional Kermes, and pueblo celebrations. This image reminded me of that as there was often a lot of food, movement and lots of energy from busy and excited people. I really like how there are parents, couples, abuelitas, children while sodas are being sipped on, tamale are being eaten and cool items are being sold in different puestos. The events are captured to every detail. Just like many of her pieces, this art takes me back to my roots and connects me to my Chicana experience.

Week 7: Letter to Delilah Montoya

Hey Delilah,

First off I wanted to say that I have fallen in love with your work of art. The first thing I truly appreciate are the black and white photography aesthetic in many of your pieces. As someones that likes to create art as well, I often find myself driven to do black and white pieces as well as they represent a sort of raw simplicity which also has a lot of richness to it.

I especially find your Women Boxer pieces to be quite magnificent as it represents women in a light that they may not often be portrayed in. The pictures capture a lot of women of color in a fighting ring or getting ready to compete and I just love how bad ass they look. I really like watching their facial expressions as they often look extremely focused, angry or really relaxed. I find this great as women's bodies are often photographed to show sexuality, softness and innocence. In this series however, women's muscles, grinning teeth and even sweat are captured which are things that often only men are associated with.Which is pretty ridiculous...

I also have a strong appreciation for the graphic art look given to many of your images as it makes them really unique while connecting to a lot of Chicano symbolism like in Glass Jar, La Llorona,Virgen imagery and El Sagrado Corazon.

As an inspiring artist myself,  a question I will have for you is where do you get inspiration and ideas for your art? I know much must be directed from being a Chicana but what specific events, experiences, or things strike upon an idea for you and tell you that is something meant to be
captured?

Week 8: Carmen Loma Garza

Carmen Loma Garza, Heaven and Hell, 1991

Carmen Loma Garza is known for works that celebrate the everyday activities and traditions of her family and Latino community. This idea of images that represent the realities of the Mexican American community as well as racial, economical, and educational disparities. I also enjoy how Garza portrays a different artistic development that explores her imagination of an imagined world. In this painting, Heaven and Hell, Garza presents parallel worlds. On the top part of the painting, figures dance to music provided by a band. But below hell is depicted with chained figures picking up stones for eternity, surrounded by flames. There is a window that allows these figures in hell to view the world that they would never be able to be part of. I enjoy this painting of Garza because it explores the inner workings, desires, and basic beliefs of her own mind. She recognizes the importance of illustrating her own identity. 

Las Peleoneras

Carmen Lomas Garza’s work seems simplistic however it is complex in color and the detailed on realistic features.  For instance, Lomas Garza’s Las Peleoneras (1988) depicts two women fighting outside a dance club. The female characters are pulling each other’s hair while couples walk away not wanting to get involved in the scandal. At first, this image comes of as comical, but then one realized this is a real depiction of how people react to violence around them.  Some might consider stepping in to help while other people do not bother to look; I find that Lomas Garza’s intention was to bring attention to the many roles imposed on women and how these can contribute to a level of violence. 

Letter to Shizu Saldamando

Hi Ms. Saldamando,

My name is Alicia Billalobos; I am a senior at UCLA majoring in Chicana/o Studies with a minor in education and an intern at the Stanley Mosk Superior Courthouse.  I chose to explore and present your artwork because I had heard your name from a friend whom you tattooed.  Your detailed skills on portraiture really caught my eye and taking an art class where I had the opportunity to explore an artist presented a perfect opportunity to get to know you as a professional figure.  The use of realism and simple mediums of art used in your work interest me because I felt a sense of understanding of the art although I have never studied art.  As I replayed interviews and presentations, where you talked about your intent to create art that is interactive with the viewer I felt validated.  Your drawing selection that includes Backyard Hardcore is my favorite because you depict the underground punk scene that is often invisible to many. Growing up in Boyle Heights, I was involved in underground music scenes that where never part of anything else besides the late night gigs that where forgotten after a drunken night.  When I saw your drawing work depicting that memory combined with your intention to make art about the audience instead of the artist itself, a genuine respect grew for your work.  I know you are now working at an East Los Angeles tattoo parlor and hope to stop by soon to get some ink on my back.  I appreciate your effort to acknowledge the simple artistic means and experiences of everyday people because it creates a dialogical interaction to the purpose and roles of artist.

Cleaning Nopalitos

     I wanted to write about Carmen Lomas Garza and her painting called Cleaning Nopalitos. I love all the wonderful lines and curves that Garza uses for her art, along with all the different colors she fills her entire frame with. I wanted to write about this painting for it displays to me Garza’s character and her style. This painting also reminds me of my ancestry and the Mesoamerican culture. I identify with the Mayans, Olmecs, and Aztecs due to fact that they inhabited America for thousands of years before Columbus or any sort of European influences. I know that eating nopales is a Native American cuisine. I also identify with Garza’s painting because in my family we eat nopales and they are really healthy and eatable good too. My mother still has some nopales in her back yard and when they are ready to harvest she or I harvests them and we take all the prickles off and we prepare them fresh to eat, it is in our culture and an honor to grow our own food. I also liked this painting because it displays an adult man and a young girl, and the man is showing her how to clean the nopales so they can be cooked, and the young child is observing curiously. This painting goes against the gender roles and it represents the Latino family, contradicting the stereo type of machismo. It is vital for us to represent our culture and show the community that we do have values and that we do have a long ancestral past to this land also. 

Hormigas

In Carmen Lomas Garza’s paintings Hormigas, she presents us with an image of a girl and boy who are feeding ants to a small animal. This image is significant to Lomas Garza’s development because it was an impetus for some of her other laser-cut artworks. While the technological shift is significant, for me, the work is special because it is so familiar. It reminds me of the many times that I have played with ants and other animals in nature. It reminds me of times that my brothers, neighbors and I would play baseball, climb trees, play tag and have adventures. In that sense, the painting is meaningful to many people.

The image also highlights the cactus plant and its pears, which underscore life and nature. Moreover, the painting captures a moment in nature. Additionally, the composition within the image points us to the hormiga. The girl in pink is highest while the boy kneels down; the stick in his hand makes us look at the single red ant he picked up. Lomas Garza uses angles to draw our eye to the smallest of creatures in nature: the ant.

I believe the critique of Lomas Garza’s works as folk or kitsch is reductive and fetishizing (and possibly racist and sexist). The assertion that her work is not sophisticated relies on the hegemonic rhetoric that asserts that art should look a certain way: there are “wrong” and “right” ways to paint. Lomas Garza moves beyond artistic hegemony by painting in her own style while she privileges her own memories and experiences. While the painting is simple in its depiction of youths looking at ants, it is significant to many.

week eight, pachuca with razor blade

My time spent in my family home this past couple of days proved to induce more nostalgia than anticipated. Nostalgia is the feeling I get when I look at this image. I was present at a Mike Brown protest on Tuesday night in downtown Los Angeles and I ran into the girls I navigated high school with. The days going into nights spent in either one of our bedrooms anticipating the night ahead were very formative, and instilled a further love for the late night in my heart. The three of us are Chicanas, and each one of us have different experiences. But there is something undoubtedly familiar about this image. The process of getting ready to go out and be seen is something very intimate and personal. Flourishing in one's own aesthetic and encouraging your friends to flourish in their own is an experience that comes with growing up into ourselves, and this image depicting the process is something I think is relatable for many people. Running into them and being reminded of that time also reminded me of this image, and although we weren't pachucas with razorblades, this is still an image that carries a lot of sentimental value. 

Week 8: Carmen Lomas Garza

One of my favorite images of Carmen Lomas Garza is Cama Para Sueños. This painting really speaks to me on a very personal level. In the same way that Garza’s mother is setting the example for her two daughters and building a bed filled with tradition and culture, my mother has done the same for me. Fitting into the gender norms of Mexican culture has not been easy. As a child I was given dolls to play with, when I wanted to play in the mud, as a young girl I was told to wear dresses even though I heated dresses. And now at the age of 23, I am expected to be searching for a man to spend the rest of my life with, because if I wait to long I will never be able to have children, this is according to Mexican tradition. So when I look at Garza’s painting I see two young girls up on the roof with dreams, and in between themselves and the moon there is nothing stopping them. The mother represents a structure for the way these girls will grow up to be, no matter what the two girls become in life they will always have their culture as a base for the building of their character. I know that no matter what I go through in life I will always have my traditions and cultures to fall back to, so when I am feeling lost I can always find myself.

Week 8: Carmen Lomas Garza

I chose Cama para Sueños because it is the only painting from Carmen Lomas Garza that I feel connected to. This connection comes from my childhood dreams and my recent experiences in life. 

 The importance of the painting is that it conveys multilayered meanings. Although Garza’s mother is preparing the bed for the night, she and her sister are reclining on the roof looking at the moon. Here, the night’s sky and its bright moon are symbols of infinite possibilities for their future. Not only I can see her memory in this painting, but hope for the future is also apparent. More importantly, the undercover message which Garza tries to bring across is that in order to reach our dreams we have to take a risk. The risks involved in this painting, which are climbing off the trees and lying on the sloped roof, make the sisters’ dreams of the future more powerful. 

 I remember my childhood when in my wildest dreams I wanted to pursue architecture in one of the best schools in the United States. Three years ago, I had the opportunity to come to this country, and I did not ignore it. However, I had to leave my past behind to make this bright future for myself. Now that I am studying at UCLA my dreams are bigger and wilder. I want to change the living conditions of the worlds’ poorest regions. Although there are risks and dangers in the paths we take towards our dreams, we should not sacrifice these dreams even if the chances of reaching them are very low.    

Week 8: On Carmen Lomas Garza

The Carmen Lomas Garza piece that most resonated with me was The Bed for Two Dreams. I think this piece carries the a lot of complexity and should be analyzed from multiple angles. For one thing I do want to comment on the concept of framing. I think it is interesting the the mother figure is framed with the windows, while she is performing domestic work. I think that speaks to the restrictions that are placed on Chicanas, that the home serves as a prison based on race, gender, and class. Meanwhile the two girls that are on the roof are not bound dream of the infinite opportunities not bound by anything and dreaming of everything. Although I do want to comment that domestic work is not bad or worthless than any other kind of labor, I do want to relate this to my experiences in pursuing art and a career in creative fields.
Being the son of immigrants art is never encouraged as a viable career option. We are always pushed towards more practical careers like in the medical or law fields respectively. So I understand this dissonance between our dreams and the expectations our parents have on us. My parents were concerned with putting food and a roof over heads, so there was no time or space to be thinking about impractical things like art.
So that is why I really appreciate this piece, It is telling me that despite what my trajectory in life might be, I am allowed to dream and to be whoever I want to.

Week 8: Carmen Lomas Garza, Tito's Gig on the Moon

  One work of Carmen Lomas Garza that I love is Tito's Gig on the Moon. Although the image appears in the text assigned in class, I first saw this image at an open artist's studio event in San Francisco. She told me and my family about how she created the work in memory of Tito Puente after he died. The work transfers the club where he often played onto the moon so he can keep performing even when he is no longer around. The gold archways demonstrate the indoor space. I found that even in this work, that may not be specifically about her family and traditions, Lomas Garza achieves a feeling of happy nostalgia, that my classmate, Renata Herrera mentioned in her post this week as well. The sense of a story so present in Lomas Garza's En Mi Familia series is visible here in the detail of the setting and characters.
  Another detail Lomas Garza shared is that the musical notes coming from the musician's instruments become the pattern in each dancer's clothing. The musician's notes become the dance moves and character of the partners. This detail seems so whimsical to me, and brings a liveliness that so few artists present and still stand as "respected" in the art world. Lomas Garza is an example of an artist that thrives on humor, and character, yet does so through a formal use of color and pattern. This work specifically shows it, but throughout her body of prints and paintings, she uses pattern so exquisitely to demonstrate that sense of home. In many of her works, the patterns seem as though from an old blouse, tablecloth, or papel picado, and add to the familial feeling in her images. Seeing the work in person helps bring those details out, but even in the text, Tito's Gig on the Moon stands out because of the bright color, and lively scene she depicts.

W8: Carmen Lomas Garza

Carmen Lomas Garza is a well known Chicana artist and curator from Texas. She is highly skilled in her use of color, handling of gouache, and her immense pieces utilizing the paper cut-out method popular in Mexican culture-- papel-picado. Installations are just a small piece of her work. As a young woman she was in charge of a small exhibit of Chicana/o artwork for the organization MAYO. This marked her first experience as a curator. After relocating in San Francisco some time later she was further mentored in the art business. All these experiences extended the breadth of her relationship to art beyond its production and into its exhibition. 

 In her installation altar piece Día de los Muertos/Ofrenda para Antonio Lomas (1988-1990) Garza honors the life of her late grandfather Antonio Lomas. Garza utilizes papel picado to adorn a background faux window looking out into a backyard in view of her grandfather while the walls the floor and table are also papel pacado-adorned. The floor is laden with colorful papel flowers. The "walls" surrounding and making up the installation are curtains de papel-picado. In the scene the table has candles, skulls, a chair, and personal items from his life such as his garden tools, paño, and hat. Each item is significant and beautifully representative of him. This homage is personal and telling of her influential and defining culture, family and spirituality. 

This piece really touched me because last year my family lost our grandfather. He too worked hard all his life, coming this country as a bracero in the 1950s. He passed at the age of 96 due to complications after emergency surgery after he fell. Despite this very sad event in our family we celebrate his long life with us and all his legacy that lies in all of us grandchildren and great grandchildren. 

Thanksgiving and Tamales

A Carmen Lomas Garza painting that stood put to me other than the three I choose for my paper would be the cahapter “A Tejana on the West Coast” and titled Tamalada. One of the reasons is because a while back Aces mentioned that the blog post tend to focus more on the subject but lack a passionate connection to the image. That the bloggers emotions seemed to be restrained.

Now this image standouts out because not only did I spend this Wednesday, Thanksgiving and Friday making tamales, but I love how this image reflects a sense of unity and love amongst family and friends.

I regards to my personal experience making tamales this images is similar to making tamales at my house but it contains a couple of differences.

The biggest being that men tend to be lacking from my image. Also I had the opportunity to recreate third image and make it my own, one would also see some bickering, others crying from laughter and the younger children a bit grumpy and being forced to make tamales especially seeing as my mom makes tamales at least once a week. In the background you would see an image of la Virgen and el Santo Padre Toribio and some Vicente Fernandez cd playing in the background. While my image is not as ideal and perfect it reflects my family's lifestyle and it juxtaposes Tamalada. An example of how every person is different even if the event is the same.

La Llorona by Carmen Lomas Garza

This image resonated with my memories of my abuelit@s telling me stories in their patio. Those stories and myths were more than just what I heard. It was sacred space in which we exchanged generational gaps and communicated through silence and teachings only WE knew were happening. Those are moments in which I could never replicate with any other parental figure in my family because in Latin@ families the dynamics and psychology of the way we interact with our grandparents is special. I also observed the way they all formed some sort of geometrical figure by using their bodies in the way they listened to the womyn telling the story. To my analysis of this as a piece of art I was able to relate it to the way in which Renaissance art used the triangle as one of their key characteristics seen in art from this era. This is significant because it tells the audience how important family values within domesticated spaces are to Latin@s.

Furthermore, as I closely saw the figure of "La Llorona" on the far upper right corner I realized how intimate these cuentos are when being shared with us. Lomas-Garza is definitely alluding to the way in which our elders use detailed and exquisite  language when speaking to us. I know this is something prominent in the way my abuelit@s told me stories because I was always able to imagine them in the back of my head. This was a way for me to build an alternate world within their tongues as they spoke to me and build something beyond the physical. 

La Feria en Reynosa

One image that struck me from Carmen Lomas Garza’s work is La feria en Reynosa. I really like the details, composition, and bright colors that fill the image with an atmosphere of happiness and harmony, like a little girl might experience it. The image feels timeless: the dolls, embroidered shirts, and regional dishes could be found at any feria in Mexico. However, if one looks closer, the complex reality of living on the U.S.-Mexico border is revealed by details such as the barbed-wire fence in the background (which represents the border) and the pensive expression of the two women sitting at a table in the foreground.

            In this piece I can see the social injustices, economic inequalities, and everyday struggles that many people at the border have to deal with. For me, the facial expressions of some of the people in the painting represent different stories and feelings. The painting transports the viewer into their stories, and makes one reflect on their own experience of parties and similar festivities. While on the surface everything is bright and happy, there are always hidden struggles and sad stories. Garza’s work is very subtle because the first impressions it brings are happy and nostalgic feelings. She can capture the joy of these important family gathering moments, but at the same time she hints at a much deeper meaning behind the festivities.