LACMA Extra Credit

This past weekend, I visited LACMA's exhibition City and Cosmos: The Arts of Teotihuacan. The ancient central Mexican city of Teotihuacan was the urban center of the Americas in the first millennium, and accordingly a vibrant artistic capital. Recently, archaeological projects have uncovered relics from Teotihuacan's three main pyramids and some residential areas, which fundamentally changed historians' understanding of the city's history.

Walking around the exhibit, I saw many artifacts, such as bowls, statues, vessels, shells and more. These art pieces "provided guides for people as they navigated the city's streets and managed natural resources." I found walking around the exhibition to be reminiscent of the scene in Black Panther, where Killmonger is indignant as his ancestor's art being locked up in a colonizer's museum before staging a heist to steal the artifacts back. Not to be the "there should be a Latinx superhero" girl, but if there were, I could see myself doing research for the costume design for him/her at this exhibition.

The Black Experience Mural Extra Credit

The Black Experience is a mural created in the 1970s by a group of black UCLA students.  It's located behind Panda Express, which I was oblivious to despite my (unfortunately) frequent visits (my attention was likely diverted to my honey walnut shrimp). It depicts some of the biggest leaders in black history. Not only does this mural show the power of public art in its placement in such a widely-visited part of campus, but it is also a testament to the perseverance of black UCLA students to uncovering the mural from walls put up during renovations.

Reflecting on Chicana Art

I came into this class with a lot of enthusiasm for Chicana art, but also some preconceptions as to how this class would function. This could be seen in my early class style: I would sit down, open my laptop, fingers ready to type out detailed notes. Professor Lopez quickly challenged my expectations for a university course--instead of having us listen to her as a spout of knowledge, she instead encouraged us to be active participants in the subject matter we were learning, both by writing often about artists and by working on an art project ourselves. Not only, then, was I studying Chicana artist, but I became a Chicana artist. I'd argue that much like Chicana artists have challenged norms in the art world, this class challenged what I expected academic art to be: pedantic and boring. Instead, it was vibrant, complex, engaging, and multifaceted. I am so thankful for this class, Professor Lopez, and my classmates for this experience and cannot wait to continue my journey in Chicana art!

Presentation 2: Lilli Bernard

The artist presentation that most intrigued me this week was that of Lili Bernard, an Afro-Cuban artist based here in Los Angeles. I found her art to be very beautiful, vibrant, and complex, and I appreciated that it seemed focused on drawing attention to the lived experiences of Afro-Latinas, as their experiences are often ignored or marginalized in Chicanx Studies classes. Moreover, as one of the women drugged raped by Bill Cosby, her art was an outlet for expression for both her own sexual traumas and that of her fellow sisters.

The painting below, titled The Sale of Venus, offers a clear parallel to Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, the latter painting depicting the goddess Venus arriving to the shore after her birth. In Bernard's response, she reimagines Venus as a black woman being sold as a slave, a style that is reminiscent of the reimagining of cultural icons by Chicanas we've studied in this class.

Thank you to the presenter for bringing this artist's work to light!

Presentation 1: Yreina Cervantez

The presentation that stood out to me most this past week was that of Yreina Cervantez, perhaps because we share a last name, but also because I found her mural-making work very compelling. Cervantez is a Chicana activist who is known for her murals and print-making. One of her most recognizable works is "La Ofrenda," which is situated right here in LA! Originally painted in 1989, this ofrenda is in honor of Dolores Huerta--co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America and a prominent figure in that movement. Since then, the mural has been vandalized a countless number of times, leading SPARC to move to protect the mural. Cervantez' work as a public artist parallels the work of muralists we've learned about in this class and it was really interesting to learn about her!

Judith F. Baca's sketch for a proposed mural at Estrada Courts (1974)

For this week's post, I wanted to talk about one of my favorite of Judith F. Baca's works: a sketch for a proposed mural at Estrada Courts from 1974. I could not find a picture of it online, but you can find it on page 90 of the assigned Judith F. Baca book.

Although never painted as a mural, I think this sketch exemplifies a lot of Baca's style as an artist and qualifies as an "artwork" under Professor Lopez's definition of there being a lot of "work" put into this piece. The sketch portrays a sort of circle of life--at least, the circle of life lived out by Chicana/Latina women. The circle begins by a woman giving birth to a boy, only for him to turn into a soldier or a cholo. He then goes after other women and their children, only to kill them or be killed. The women mourn their deaths, only to give birth to another man and restart the cycle.

Because this sketch was worked on solely by Baca, and not other members of her mural-making team, Baca's unadulterated style shines through--as the book mentions, it is not always easy to differentiate between where Baca ends and where her organization, SPARC, begins. In particular, this image speaks to Baca's willingness to portray an oppositional view to the status quo in her art, challenging the traditional roles for women and even criticizing women's participation in men's destruction.

Carmen Lomas Garza

Carmen Lomas Garza is a Chicana narrative artist known for portraying the everyday experiences of the lives of Mexican Americans.

"Tamalada" (1988)

In this image, for instance, Garza depicts a family having a "tamalada," or a tamale making session. She takes care to infuse small hints at a larger Mexican American culture in every inch of the portrait, from choosing a painting of the Last Supper to place on the wall (signaling a strong Catholic faith), to a characteristically Mexican-American calendar (probably received at the local panaderia). Something I find particularly notable about Garza's paintings is the sheer number of people in each one--while other artists we've studied have largely focused on the individual, Garza places strong import on the sense of community in Mexican-American culture.

"Curandera" (1989)

Even in paintings like Curandera, where there are less people physically present, we see the spiritual presence of others as being important in Mexican-American culture, with old paintings of relatives hanging on the wall, and and altar to La Virgen de Guadalupe. Thus, even in an intimate scene of a mother caring for her sick daughter, the presence of a larger spiritual community aids in the healing.

Yolanda M. Lopez

Artist Yolanda M. Lopez was one of the most influential in the Chicana/o movement, and with good reason: she reimagined powerful cultural symbols and politicized them, shaping them to serve the movement's needs. As one of her most iconic artworks, Who’s the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim? (1978) epitomizes Lopez’s politically charged style. As discussed in class, this work invokes Uncle Sam, a prevalent historical symbol alluding to feelings of patriotism, but reshapes him as an indigenous American, so as to question U.S. hypocrisies. Davalos writes, “As a political artist, Lopez was part of a larger artistic movement among Chicanos, Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans in which art functioned to to ‘nurture and sustain an insurgent consciousness.’” In other words, Davalos argues that with its political nature, Lopez, and artists like her served to nourish the politics of the Chicana/o movement of the 1970s, and suggests that the movement would be weaker without such art. Indeed, the ubiquity of this image in the movement speaks to this.

Alicia Gaspar de Alba's CARA essay

Something that struck me from the Alicia Gaspar de Alba's essay was the idea that the grouping and curation of artworks in an exhibition is just as important, if not more so, than the original intent of the artist. This was evident in the artist exhibition CARA: Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, where although individually, the artworks chosen to display could be seen as strongly feminist, when grouped together as they were, portrayed Chicanas in a patriarchal light.

This notion was all the more striking because, just months previously, I had seen Judith Baca's Las Tres Marias shown at the Hammer Museum as part of their Radical Women exhibition. When I saw it displayed there, I interpreted it as challenging perceptions of what a Chicana woman should and could be. I was surprised, then, to see just how much the placement of the piece at the CARA exhibition distorted and reduced it to a placement of women between two equally male-driven views of the Chicana.

I also wanted to address something we discussed in class, which was why none of the male-identified students in our class wanted to identify as feminists and very few as queer allies. Although I appreciated one student's viewpoint of being aware enough to not want to co-opt a space, I'd argue that not publicly voicing your support for a group does more to advance the opposing viewpoint than your silence does to help the one you're quietly for. Furthermore, another student mentioned a reason for not wanting to identify as feminist was because he felt a sort of cognitive dissonance between the ideals of feminism and his consumption of mainstream music and culture. This is something I've struggled with as well, but as an old professor told me, "masticalo como chicle"--that is, you can chew music and pop culture like gum, without fully ingesting it, staying aware and critical of the structures that have built such a culture. Thoughts?

Debra Blake's Chicana Sexuality and Gender

In her book Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art, Debra Blake explores the manners by which U.S.-Mexican women conceptualize and, more importantly,  re-conceptualize popular cultural motifs to form a narrative of their experiences, and analyzes how these re-conceptions fit into a larger U.S. Mexicana cultural movement. For instance, Blake examines the representations of indigenous Mexican goddesses and La Virgen de Guadalupe both from the perspectives of working-class U.S. Mexicanas and their professional intellectual counterparts, and places these representations within a larger feminist framework. “Chicana feminists,” Blake argues, “reorient the issues by making use of various strategies and theories to accomplish their aims … They apply diverse strategies and [feminist] theories simultaneously and provisionally to outmaneuver various adversaries.” By invoking indigenous Mexican goddesses, then, Blake maintains that Chicana feminists form a historical tie to their Mexican identity while simultaneously differentiating themselves from white or Mexican feminists by embracing a feminism that also recognizes oppression sourcing from race or class.

Presentation: Laura Aguilar

I will cover Laura Aguilar for my presentation.

Laura Aguilar is a photographer from San Gabriel, CA. Born with auditory dyslexia, photography became a vital medium of expression for Aguilar. As a queer Chicanx woman, Aguilar belongs to, as she puts it, "a hidden subculture within another subculture, a marginalized community within another marginalized community." Her work heavily explores this nesting of identities, and frequently features her own body as a symbol to challenge norms of weight, sexuality, and more.

One of her images, seen below, shows Aguilar reclining in relaxation on an apparently sweltering summer day. By portraying an unconventional body engaged in a universal feeling, this image serves to challenge perceptions on types of bodies that are accepted by our society.

Although primarily self-taught, Aguilar did briefly attend East Los Angeles College, where decades later her work was featured in a solo exhibition at ELAC's Vincent Price Art Museum as part of the Pacific Standard Time LA/LA initiative. I had the privilege of seeing the exhibition, titled Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, when it was in town, and am excited to explore her work more thoroughly with this presentation.

A big mood.

Cervantes, Alejandra

Hey y'all! My name is Alejandra Cervantes and I am a senior transfer Mathematics/Computer Science student. Although I was born and raised in Yuba City, CA (home of the world's smallest mountain range!), my parents initially lived in Los Angeles when they immigrated to the United States from Mexico in the 80s, and so I feel strong ties and love for this city. I'm taking this class because, as a result of my first Chicanx Studies 10A class, I became enthralled by Chicanx artists like Judy Baca and Patssi Valdez, and am excited by the prospect of learning more about artists like them.

In her essay "It's Not the Santa in my Fe, It's About the Santa Fe in my Santa," Alma Lopez challenges the Eurocentric narrative of la Virgen de Guadalupe, a powerful and enduring symbol in Mexican/Chicanx culture, and explores the re-imagination of her in a, perhaps more honest, indigenous light. This new conception of la Virgen de Guadalupe is significant in that it reappropriates her as an act of resistance by an indigenous people who were enduring atrocities at the hand of Spanish, Roman Catholic colonists, and asserts indigenous artistic and revolutionary ability. Not only that, but Lopez leverages the cultural connotations of la Virgen as a symbol that permeates Chicanx culture in her own artwork to defy norms of sexual orientation, sexual violence, the virtuousness of virginity, and more.