Week 4: Laura Alvarez

Laura Alvarez, a Mexican-American artist who was born in Newport Beach and raised in Orange County, explores her heritage and experiences to create and inform her artwork. Yet, her work then goes beyond just a source of informing, it is serves as a mode of self-empowerment. According to Rosario Castellanos, as cited by Blake, “The boldness of exploring one’s self; the need to become conscious of one’s bodily existence or the unheard-of pretention to confer a meaning on one’s spiritual existence are severely repressed and punished by the social apparatus”(74). Chicana artist, like Alvarez, do explore oneself as a fight against that oppression which in turn calls for empowerment. One of Laura Alvarez’s works that in my opinion does this is  Clean Up at the Monsanto House of the Future ( a  4’ x 6’, acrylic on paper from 2009). This is an artwork that shows her main character, a maid, who is working on raking the garden and is dressed in what is supposed to be a modern, stylish, and elegant dress but is actually a secret agent.  In this work, the background idea is based on her history and experiences of her mother working as a maid and of her occasionally helping her mother. She had mentioned in lecture that she always wore her best attire when she went to help her mother clean houses which is a live performance of her resisting the oppressive stereotype of the maid look. In this artwork, she does the same. That is, she draws on her experience of dressing up for work as maid and she is simultaneously reflecting on the oppressive ideas of what maid’s clothing style is. She is breaking the view of only being a maid by exposing the femininity of being a woman with the capacity of being elegant, fashionable, and having a multi-layered life (maid, gardener, fashionista, and secret agent). This is the type of exploration that is empowering to her and others who identify with the character because it proves that women in general and women of the working class do not have to be conforming to stereotypes and single dimensionality. Although, I must recognize that her choice of attire for her modern and stylish maid is reflection of her subjectivity of what constitutes as feminine and modern, an attribute that could have either been consciously or unconsciously acquired by mainstream fashion.