Final Post: Reflection

As a senior graduating in about a week (woah), I had never taken a Chicana studies class until this quarter.  As a World Arts and Cultures major, I thought that was pretty ridiculous so I was excited to see that this class was being offered.  Within the first few weeks of the class I realized how little Chicana studies had been incorporated into my education.  There were some specific artists we learned about in this class who allowed me to especially connect with the material, because their work allowed me to draw connections between their artistic methodology and concepts I had previously learned about in my WAC classes.

One of these artists was Celia Alvarez Muñoz.  Her work stood out to me because it incorporated the theme of the communicative disconnect that occurs between cultures.  I enjoyed how personal her work felt as I learned about her experience in American schooling as a Spanish speaking child growing up in a Mexican American family.  I felt that her work provided an insight about the confusion that lies within language and communication, that I wish more people in the United States took the time to understand.

I also really enjoyed getting the opportunity to research Delilah Montoya's work for my presentation.  In my department we are encouraged to to engage in an interdisciplinary arts education, so I was excited to see the variety of mediums she used in her work.  She is such a creative artist when it comes to her choices of representation in her work.  The way she represents stories, characters, and real life people, shows her perspective as a Chicana artist who uses her work to question the way these things are traditionally represented in American, and Mexican-American culture.

Overall, I feel very lucky to have learned about these artists and I have gained new insight on Chicana art and artists.  I look forward to seeing more Chicana work outside of class!

Presentations: Kim Bjanes

Looking back on my classmates presentations last week, the presentation on Kim Bjanes really stuck out to me.  Although I like listening to the biographies, stories about each artist and learning about their work, the presentation about Bjanes felt a little more personal.  The presenter shared stories about how she grew up in a Spanish speaking home, hearing the stereotypical, negative, phrases, about her hair.  But then she showed how Bjanes used this same phrase in her printmaking to reclaim the phrase into a source of empowerment for beautiful, brown, women with big, curly hair.  Bjanes struggled with her own identity as a light skinned Latinx artist, and uses her work to acknowledge her own privilege while empowering the voices of her "darker skinned sisters."  Her art shows us how empowering it can be to reclaim words that have been engrained into womens' minds as something negative and/ or shameful.  The following is a picture of Bjanes wearing one of her own prints on a shirt.

Carmen Lomas Garza: Una Tarda

Constance Cortes explores the connections between the artwork and communal customs of Chicana artist Carmen Lomas Garza, in the book, Carmen Lomas Garza.  Cortes focuses on the themes that are a part of every day practices in Garza’s Mexican-American community in South Texas.  In the text, the author explains the significance behind customs, family history, and communal gatherings that Garza shows in her work.  She often paints from her memories of day-to-day activities with her family, and folk heroes within her community.  By focusing on these themes in her work, Garza has faced controversy within the modern, American, art community. Whether her paintings show her large family making tamales together in a vibrant kitchen, or a memory from an afternoon in her grandmother’s room, they exhibit the politics of memory in her artwork.
Garza painted Una Tarde/One Summer Afternoon several in 1993.  In this painting, she shows the viewer the moment she realized that her friend came to her grandmother’s house so often to see the boy next door.  While the grandmother watches over the teenagers flirting with one another through the windowsill, she knits in her chair quietly kitting in the corner.  Meanwhile, Garza (shown as a young girl) sits braiding the bed fringe near the nightstand.  We see a cat feeding her kittens, and religious, familial, and cultural symbols on the bedroom wall such as a cross, a small shrine to La Virgen de Guadalupe, and black and white photos of old family members.  Garza may be braiding to distract herself from her revelation about her friend, but this scene also offers Garza’s perspective of herself as an artist, within the realm of Chicano social, religious, and romantic expectations under patriarchal authority.
This piece stood out to me because I related to Garza's position the situation in the painting.  I remember times when my friends' main focus was a person they had a crush on, and I would rather isolate myself than involve myself in something that seemed so silly at the time.  I like the way she shows her lack of connection to to the situation, as she braids the bed skirt.  I can think of many other times I isolated myself in similar ways as a child when I just wanted to do my own thing.

Carmen Lomas Garza: Tamalada

When I was looking through some of Carmen Lomas Garza’s work, Tamalada stood out to me because it reminded me of my own family.  I have never actually made tamales with my own family, because my family is Jewish so the food we make together reflects our heritage.  However, the crowded kitchen with every family member doing something different to contribute to the meal (other than the man and the little girl observing from the doorway) reminds me of my family’s routine in my grandma’s kitchen to prepare for Passover or Hanukkah.  I appreciate Garza’s focus on her own memories with her family.  In Tamalada, she shows us a moment in her every day life with her family in a Mexican-American community.  I always appreciate when artists focus on the every day aspects of their lives in their own work.  The way she portrays these memories allows us to learn about her community and culture in a personal way.

Roberto Tejada: Celia Alvarez Muñoz

Celia Alvarez Muñoz took five color photographs and added two different kinds of text below the photo panels, in 1982 for her MFA.  This work is titled, Enlightenment #4: Which Came First?  The artist compares her confusion over learning English, to her confusion around chickens, in the text directly below the photos.  Below that line of text, she includes a strip of paper that children in elementary school use to learn how to write.  On the paper, she writes five different –tenses of a sentence about when a chicken lays an egg.  This piece forces the viewer to think about the issue of language, and how it can manifest when a child like Alvarez Muñoz is speaking Spanish at home, while forced to speak and write in only English in school.  The photos show five eggs lined up next to one another, from varying perspectives.  Most of the perspectives make the eggs seem as though they are in a perfectly straight row, and all the same size.  In the beginning of the book, she mentions a reoccurring dream where she finds herself in a marching band and over it.  There is a notable similarity between this dream and her eggs, which appear to be “marching” in all of the panels except for the last where they are turned towards the viewer to reveal that they are indeed different sizes. 

CARA: Alicia Gaspar de Alba (Article)

Professor Alicia Gaspar de Alba explains the gender politics imbedded in the CARA exhibit.  The official title, “CARA,” stands for, “Chicano Art, Resistance and Affirmation.”  Throughout this article, the author points out the various ways in which CARA overall failed to convey that it was constructed from a feminist viewpoint.  I feel the words in the title, “Resistance,” and “Affirmation,” are words I would personally associate with a feminist lens (especially in the context of an art exhibit).

The author qualitatively evaluates the exhibit, only to find that far less female artists were included in CARA, than male.  She poses the example of the Chicana artist collective, las Mujeres Muralistas, as a kind of group that could have been included in an exhibit like CARA, since it was indeed the first major national Chicano/a art exhibit.  It seems like CARA is a space that exemplifies the sexual politics of the overall Chicano art movement.  The pieces in the exhibit are vessels that distinguish what identity politics are and how they exist.  The author explains that identity politics formulate the identity of a group or community.  Therefore, I agree with the author in the sense that CARA is very much participating in the identity politics of many various participants (whether they are artists, viewers, academics, activists, etc.) in the Chicano/a art movement.  I thought it was important when the author emphasized the importance and influence in the history of the formation of Chicano/a identity within the context of the community’s art movement.  While reading, I felt like Chicana artists have always been pushed out of the movement in some way because of their unique positionality.  In the history of this movement, ”some of the Chicanas were also resisting another form of oppression, internal to the Movement, and for this resistance they were labeled by the patriarchs and their female allies traitors to the Chicano Movement” (125).  The author points out the work featured in CARA, that perpetuates stereotypical archetypes of Mexican women.  Because of situations like this, I believe in the necessity for the visibility of Chicana art that forces viewers to no longer perpetuate the oppressive history of these identity politics.

Presentation 2018: Delilah Montoya

For my presentation I have chosen to explore Delilah Montoya.  She was raised in the Midwest, but has lived in New Mexico for a long time which is where her mother’s family lived.  Montoya is a photographic printmaker who has experimented with video, digital printing, room installations, and action photography.  I was drawn to Montoya’s work because a lot of it felt very confrontational.  She explores Chicana sexuality, spirituality, and Mesoamerican folklore in her work.  I feel like Montoya incorporates themes in her work that we have been focusing on in this class, but I want to learn more about how she incorporates themes exactly into her practice.  From what I have seen so far, her photos and instillations stood out to me.  I enjoy their lack of bright color, and I believe they exhibit her positionality as a Chicana artist. I’m not well versed in digital printmaking and photography, so I think I should learn more about how she merges all of these practices in order to have her perspective come across so strongly to a viewer.