Week 3: Yolanda Lopez

After this week's reading, I have found that Yolanda Lopez's politics on representation and her journey in developing her politics and own identity were very powerful and come across very clearly in her work. One of my favorite pieces of hers was the third of four collaged, mixed media portraits of her grandmother Victoria. The face of her grandmother is drawn with just charcoal or pencil against a plain white background with her body and clothing made up of various images of nature including clouds, trees, and flowers. Her grandmother’s face rests naturalistically as if she was looking into a mirror. We see her as she would see herself. Meanwhile her clothes is representative of everything surrounding us, like she can exist anywhere where there is nature. By combining the simple naturalistic drawing of her face and the collaged body of nature, Lopez created a portrait of an “ordinary” Chicana woman as something as common and as powerful as nature and in a way that the subject would have ordinarily seen herself, not as others would have seen her. 

Additionally, coming from San Diego, I did not know a lot of the history of her involvement concerning the creation of Chicano Park, and it was interesting learning more about many of the places I’m regularly at in San Diego. However, it upsets me that still, even in the creation of the historic Chicano Park, many of the murals perpetuate the same patriarchal dominance that we’ve been discussing.