Yreina Cervantez

For my presentation, I chose the Chicana artist Yreina Cervantez. She is a multimedia artist, muralist, printmaker, and Chicana/o/x Studies professor at CSU Northridge.

Alicia Gaspar de Alba's article "Out of the House, the Halo, and the Whore's Mask: The Mirror of Malinchismo" talks about the underrepresentation of Chicana artists in the Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (CARA) exhibition. This opens up a larger conversation about gender conceptions and relations within the Chicano Movement, and more specifically, in the Chicano Art Movement that arose from it. The Chicana artists featured in the exhibition, although not greatly represented, still carved out space for themselves to challenge and critique the dominant gender-biased, patriarchal expressions of El Movimiento and the Chicano Art Movement while alongside Chicano artists. Yolanda M. Lopez’s portrait of herself as the Virgen de Guadalupe disrupts the traditional depictions of the Virgen in Chicano Art by showing her as a muscular marathon runner, unconcerned about covering her body with the star-covered shawl, gripping the snake with her bare hands, and trampling the angel that lays at her feet. The art produced by the Chicana artists were reflections of themselves and their struggle to get their narratives heard.

An interesting point that I thought Gaspar de Alba brought up is the need to acknowledge intersections of Anglo/European, Third World, and Chicana feminisms in order to understand the lack of representation in the exhibition and the gender politics behind it. Chicana feminism brings in the angle of gender difference, class, and race, but also includes the nuances within the Chicana experience -- “issues of language and culture, of nationality and citizenship, of autonomy and choice” just to name a few (124).
My question is, if we are trying to use the multiple lenses of feminism to examine this exhibition, how can those lenses be used to also critique the privileged, and often inaccessible, spaces where art is often shown and ascribed value? (i.e. this exhibition was held at UCLA's Wight Art Gallery)