Week 7: Artist Overview of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood was born in 1949 in Sacramento to a Chicana mother and father of Huichol Indian ancestry. Based on my research she worked alongside her parents as an adolescent in agricultural work. Her father was undocumented and he was subjected to deportation several times and the latter is why migration and borders are subjects she explores with her artwork. Whenever her father would get deported, her and her mother would travel to Mexico in attempt to bring him back (they were not always successful). I think this is an important story to reflect on because all she and her parents wanted was to keep their family together and the thing keeping them apart are man-made declarations. Citizenship papers and borders can change often with a flick of a pen but nature does not follow the same man-made guidelines. Drawing a line in the dirt will not stop the flowers, plants, or other wildlife that existed in the same space before the border was drawn from existing on both sides; and the wildlife may migrate further into the land of both sides due to natural phenomenons The violence and harm that people often endured because of borders is something that I think about when I am looking at her work but learning about her background with her father it also reminds me that family and community are strong and necessary forces in the story of migration and building on these forces can be pushbacks to migration cruelties.

Recurring motifs in Consuelos work is the barbed wire, geographical mapping, nature, and the word Caution. The motifs are used in her artwork to tell the story of migration in her artwork. She medium she works in is painting and textile and thread. She feels more akin to textile and thread because she feels a connectivity to the Indigenous women of the world as she says that all Indigenous women know and work with the needle and thread. In my paper I will further reflect on how her Indigeneity is reflected in her artwork.