Lopez, Alma

Prof. Lopez drawing stencil for silk screen

My name is Alma Lopez. I am the instructor for the Chicana Art & Artists course. I am a Mexican-born queer Chicana visual artist. The mediums I focus on are public art, acrylic painting, silk-screening, digital photography, digital video, and photo-based digital prints. I earned my BA at UC Santa Barbara and my MFA at UC Irvine. Both degrees are from Art Studio departments where students usually referred to instructors by their last name. This course is offered by the Cesar E. Chavez Department of Chicana/o Studies and is cross-listed with Art and World Arts and Cultures. As an academic department, they prefer instructors be referred by title and last name. So you may refer to me as Professor Lopez.

This is the third time I teach this course at UCLA. Each time, the course is slightly different. This course changes slightly depending classroom setup, days offered, number of students, guest artists, student presentations, and assigned texts as well as classroom discussions. I am always excited about teaching this course because I am able to share artists and art that I find interesting, and sometimes through student presentations, I am introduced to new artists.

The intention of this blog is to serve as an additional discussion space. Classroom time affords us a limited time for discussion. In this blog via short posts, each of us will be able to continue classroom discussions on art, artists, and reading materials.

Students: Your first introductory discussion blog post is due on or before 6pm on Saturday, October 3. In this first post, introduce yourself (name, major, year, interest in this course). If you grew up with the Virgin of Guadalupe, please write about that experience. If you did not, then write about a similar important icon in your home/family. The post should be between 200 – 300 words, which is about 3 paragraphs consisting of 4 to 8 sentences. For example this post is only 346 words. Your post should be titled: LastName, FirstName. It should be labeled: F2015LastNameFirstName. Make sure to check your spelling and grammar.