Blog 6: Carmen Lomas Garza

Carmen Lomas Garza. Cakewalk, 1987. Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 inches.

For this week’s blog post, I decided to go with this image by Carmen Lomas Garza. This is one of my favorite paintings from Garza. In this painting, a young Carmen is at a Cakewalk fundraiser hosted by the American GI Forum (AGIF). The purpose of this event is to raise money and send Mexican Americans to a University. The game worked like this, you paid twenty-five cents to stand on a number in a circle. Music plays and people walk around the circle, and when the music stops, you have to stop. A random number is called out and the person who is on that number that was called received a cake. This game I found to be a lot like musical chairs minus the elimination part involved with musical chairs. This image illustrates a fun and relaxed gathering of the community. In all, I like how they all have come together to support education while having fun at the same time. I have never seen or heard of such a game, and I think I am going to have to steal this idea and play it one day because it looks really fun.