Week 3

Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe (1978)

The work by Yolanda Lopez I will be writing about is Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe (1978). I really liked how Yolanda Lopez goes about portraying the “ordinary woman”. Unlike the usually nameless, sensual subjects of early modernist paintings of mundane experiences, Lopez places women who she has significant relationships to in a world where her gender, ethnicity, and class are active components of the overall image. In this piece, for example, Lopez depicts her mother- a Mexican working class woman whose body reflects the toll labor has had on her.  She doesn’t offer a romanticized image of labor. She doesn’t have to. By having Margaret sewing the gold-starred cloak, Lopez also illustrates the agency of a woman who is working to create her own image rather than be the dutiful and idealized version that is cloaked on her. And yet, with the rays of sunshine surrounding Margaret, I feel like Lopez is asking us, “Shouldn’t she be honored too?” Not honored as in placed on a pedestal as a blueprint for what the Chicana should be, as is done by many Chicanos, rather because this ordinary woman is another version of what a Chicana is or could be. Yolanda Lopez’ politics of representation operate from her critique of sentimentality. She explores this in her art not by recovering a divine feminine figure  but rather through emphasis on human dignity in her subjects. With this image, Yolanda Lopez offers new portraits of femininity that rejects the passive, romanticized version of the Chicana woman. I think in learning about the Lopez’s family background, her connections to her culture, and her politics of representation makes me appreciate this piece more than I would have if I didn’t.