Presentation: Barbara Carrasco

The artists that stood out to me from this past week’s presentation was Barbara Carrasco. Barbara Carrasco has a lot of art work that focuses on the Chicanx Movement. She is a Chicana herself who was born in El Paso, Texas to Mexican-American parents. Carrasco later moved to Los Angeles where she still resides in and works at. A fun fact about Carrasco is that her mother admired a lot of Japanese art and their home was mostly decorated by it. The Japanese artwork is what influenced her to begin doing art herself. Barbara Carrasco primarily uses her art to advocate change in the treatment of Chicana women. Barbara Carrasco was also a part of the CARA exhibition, which we spoke about in class a few weeks ago. Barbara Carrasco’s art work was first recognized when she was attending Catholic school. My classmate presented the image titled Names Can Hurt. This artwork is a self-portrait of Barbara. Barbara was teased because of her appearance, because she did not look like a stereotypical Mexican because she was guera, light skin with green eyes. The fact that she was told to take advantage of her appearance inspired this artwork. In the image you can see that Barbara Carrasco made her skin appear darker than usual. This was to fight against the skin-color hierarchy of the Chicanx community. The image also depicts lots of names around her that could possibly be the names she was called. This image was done with acrylic paint on a canvas.