week 2 - CARA

In Chapter 3 of Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House, Alicia Gaspar de Alba provides a necessary critique of CARA (Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation), a traveling exhibition of Chicano/a art that toured the United States in the early 1990s. CARA was the first comprehensive exhibition of Chicano art that had ever been shown in major American museums. While the show signified a major triumph for Chicano art, it also revealed that there was still much work to be done in terms of achieving gender equality within the Chicano community.

As Gaspar de Alba notes, female artists were disproportionately underrepresented in the CARA exhibit. The exclusion of artists like Las Mujeres Muralistas, as well as the inclusion of work that revolves around the female body and reproduction, directly reflected the dominant codes of Chicanismo and reinforced the idea that women were second-class citizens within el Movimiento. Additionally, Gaspar de Alba makes an important distinction—the pieces done by Chicana artists, when viewed individually, challenge the traditional roles and models of Chicano patriarchy. The curatorial choice to display all those images together, on the other hand, only seeks to further the sexist agenda of el Movimiento, reinforcing the archetypes of woman as whore/mother/virgin.