Final Post

Insane as it is, this is my final required World Arts and Cultures class. I am so happy that the department decided to make this a multidisciplinary course. In all of my four years in the major, I have yet to take a course that both incorporates and focuses on visual art and the practice of visual art. I so appreciated this course because it offered an outlet to tap back into this visual side of my expression. I felt that the assignments, while structured, left much room for personal narrative to shine through. I actually carried the journal around with me most places that I went, mainly so I could continue my hand drawings when I found down time. But I found myself relying on that journal for more than just the fulfilling structured assignments. I keep a journal, but only for the purposes of writing; I usually write in it at night in bed. It was such a different experience to have a tangible space to not only express myself in word form, but in visual form as well. Scrolling through the journal now, there are many parallels between my entries, similarities in thought throughout the quarter. There is something incredibly powerful about being able to revisit these entries, to revisit these thoughts. Because the quarter system functions like a bullet train, I rarely take time to reflect on the ten week process. I so appreciate that this class provided the space for that reflection. I also appreciate that conversations throughout the course challenged me to rethink about notions of identity as potentially limiting versus empowering.

Week 9--Chicana Print makers and Favianna

Chicana printmakers work does not have to reflect a single experience, or a single identity. Rather, prints reflect a multitude of experiences that address a multitude of identities. As the production of print making enables mass production, thus reaching a larger population, print making has the power to be a political gesture. In class last week we began to discuss work by Favianna Rodriguez. Favianna’s work brings feminist ideology into conversation with Chicana identity. Her pieces perfectly blend this cross-sectionality of multiple identities in print form. I love Favianna’s work. Not only do I love the aesthetic, but her prints feel so relatable while making such a political statement, approachable but powerful. She truly takes her personal experiences and situates them in a political framework, reaching a large audience because of the innate nature of the medium of print making. While I love all of her work, one of my favorites is her Occupy Sisterhood image. This image, along with many of her other prints, uses minimal but vivid color choices coupled with powerful bold words. I so appreciated that this image calls to attention that oppressive forces on women are not limited to the female experience— they affect everyone.

Week 8--Carmen Lomas Garza

I chose this image by Carmen Lomas Garza because it reminded me of my own family dinners. While I do not identify as a Chicana, my family meals mirror those of this image. Over thanksgiving this past weekend, my family and I gathered at my aunt’s house for the festivities. Multiple generations sat around the table, each tasked with a different preparation for the meal.  The scene looked much like that show in Tamalada. Each individual relaxed and hard at work, conversation flowing but never forced. In my family, meal-time, particularly dinner time, has always been regarded as sacred. My young cousins running around the dinner table, constantly being reminded to help, teens beginning to navigate the space between the kids and the adults, and the parents all happy to be gathered. At my family dinners there are usually fifteen of us. Since coming to college, these dinners hold an even more special place in my heart and I feel that this image captures the beauty held in these gatherings.

Letter to Laura Aguilar

Dear Laura Aguilar,

I cannot stop thinking about the power in your work, the feeling seeing your images evoked for me. I like to think I am an empowered woman, but it is hard to reinforce that notion for myself when I am consistently told on the daily not to love myself. Living in Los Angeles, I struggle to find a connection to my surroundings, to feel beauty in my body being constantly infiltrated by media images that tell me I am not enough or too much. More over, I struggle to find a connection to my body and my surrounding in the city place. Outdoor spaces and nature have been an active part of my life since I was young. When I was a child, my family and I went camping during the summers. Being from Northern California, we rarely made it down to the desert space of Joshua Tree, and often found ourselves in Yosemite and Plumas Eureka state park. I felt at home there. I felt free swimming in the rivers and prancing about amongst the trees. I was unaware of my body there, as each inhale of mountain air felt like a corporeal experience, a stride towards becoming physically closer to the natural surroundings. As a woman, I innately struggle with body image. I am constantly told not to love myself. When I enter natural spaces, that entire notion, as if like magic, is eradicated. I think I felt such a connection to your work because for me it felt like you found that connection to body and self in nature as well. Perhaps I am reading too much what I want to see, but I wanted to ask you if you find ways to carry this connection, this sense of empowerment, to your life outside of the desert. I appreciate your honesty present in your work; I think it makes it far more beautiful and relatable. Thank you for sharing your experience as I feel it has helped me better understand my own.

Best,

Nina Friedman

Week 6--Classmate Commentary: Lucero Duran (The Human Body: Isis Rodriguez and Laura Aguilar)

In her post this past week, Lucero drew connections between the work of Isis Rodriguez and Laura Aguilar. She notes the similarities of the two artists, commenting on gender inequality, sexism, and false standards of beauty and arguing that both artists draw attention to the truths behind these issues. I appreciate how Lucero draws connections between Isis’s work and Laura’s work. As noted in her post, both artists use the female body to make an individual statement about female empowerment. Using their personal experience with the body in relation to societal standards and enforcements of patriarchy, each artist has created work that draws on said personal experience to make art in a larger call for female empowerment.

This morning I was talking with my friend about exotic dancers. She and I got in an argument about if being a dancer can be empowering. She said that she could see how it would be empowering, in that it is a reclaiming over one’s sexuality. I claimed that while that might be valid, this reclaiming is occurring within patriarchal confines of our society; I claimed that these women, while maybe empowered through their sexuality, were still performing for men. I brought in Isis’s story, explaining that her experience in the dancing industry was largely disempowering. While at the end of the conversation my friend and I had not come to a mutual consensus I could not stop thinking about Isis’s experience. I appreciate that Lucero drew attention to the fact that Isis’s work is meant to both empower women and shed light on the truth of the industry.

Week 5-- Laura Aguilar

Much of my schooling thus far in both my major and minor has functioned as this reinforcement of empowerment through intraspection. For the past four years I have preached this notion of exploring and embracing multiple identities as a means to empower the self. Despite such ideas, I rarely though of the construct of identity, or multiple identities, could be oppressive. As Edwin explained in class this past Monday, identity can function as alienating and oppressive in the way that titles tend to pigeonhole us. Titles, even if self proclaimed, that denote race and gender are constricting and limiting. If we do not conform to the image that is typically associated with any one title or identity, then we are deemed as “wrong” or “unfitting” by society.

Laura Aguilar’s work deals with this relationship of self to identity in a larger social context. I think her work is beautiful. After watching the videos, I feel her relationship to her art functions as a means to access notions of empowerment in aspects of her identity. I also felt a deep connection to her work. Not only was it aesthetically inviting, in the comparison of the body in relation to nature, but also I felt a relationship to her work as a woman. I both appreciated and empathized with how she navigated her personal sense of identity within these confines of constricting structures of identity. I hope we watch more of her videos in class and continue to see her work.