Rodriguez, Sasha

 

Hello everyone! My name is Sasha Rodriguez and I use she/her pronouns. I am a second-year transfer student going into my senior year at UCLA. Pursuing a Political Science major with a double minor in Labor Studies and Chicana/o and Central American Studies. 

I took a course in this department last fall and we studied different interpretations from Chicanx and Latinx artists of the Virgen de Guadalupe where my interest in this topic began. "Conditions for Producing Chicana Art" does inform us that Chicana/x and Latinx art is now more than that artistic definition of the Virgen but I will always be in awe of that introduction because it seems that was just the beginning of Chicana art. It is a media that is creating new definitions for the phrase Chicana Art and as the readings suggest there should not be a difference in valuing art because of society's gender views I still wanted to pursue a course that did focus on women. I believe that in order to create that equality and no longer have this hierarchy on deciding "better" artists we need to sometimes focus on artists that get overlooked. This is something I am hoping to gain from this course, learning about artists that I'm not familiar with, and from the first readings, we are already on a great start!

Although I am no artist myself I do enjoy learning about the subject. I want to learn about how to get more involved with art as a supporter and deeper my limited knowledge of Latinx art and artists. I've grown up in areas where the Latinx population had a lot of influence but art wasn't published or displayed in the way we would think about art such as in a museum or exhibit. For me, Latinx art has always been murals on the streets of East LA or downtown. It's going to be interesting to include more to that definition and see different ways art is present in our community.