2020KamgarLucy Week 2

This blog for week two was due the 23rd of January but I was unable to access the blog until today so I am making up the missed posts. One Yolanda Lopez image which struck me is the one within her series of her mother, and it is titled Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe. 

Yolanda M. López, Margert F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe, from the Guadalupe series, 1978. 

Oil on pastel on paper, 22 x 30 inches. 

https://www.chicano.ucla.edu/files/LopezGuide.pdf 

Her reimagined Virgen de Guadalupe is truly outstanding, and I love this specific one on her mother for a variety of reasons. I feel this depiction of a woman, working hard, the tolls of her job weighing down on her and reflected in her expression is symbolic, representative and powerful. There does not seem to be a beautification of López's mothers work, it is a representation showing what it truly looks like. And yet, her background shines the brightest of all the works, with vibrant yellows, oranges and reds, showing her love for her mother and the power in this painting. Yet, there is a beauty in her mother, not a traditional beauty but it is still there, and I have a hard time describing it but I feel like there is beauty in her mother's strength, there is beauty in her mother's gesture, sewing the navy star studded cloak her daughter wears in the accompanying image and that her mother sits upon in the third work. 

This beauty present is one not typically shown in depictions of women, and women of color. I think, for the most part, there are not many -or at least when these works were made- representations of  women of color in art, media and just in general, and the depictions seen can more often than not be of a specific type of woman who is young, thin, feminine, attractive etc. This creates a vacuum where women of color do not typically see themselves or their diversity represented, and López's series shows different types of women, doing different things, looking different ways and of different ages, and it helps to create a multiplicity of perspective and representation. It, I imagine, also helps to represent other women who see themselves in these works, or see women they know reflected, and perhaps helps to open dialogue to continue creating works and showing more diversity in representation through art. It helps to shift the narrative of women of color into one which fosters more of what women really look like, and I think it is extremely important.