DU SKYLAR blog 5

One Summer Afternoon, 1993 depicts Garza’s memory of a visit to her grandmother’s house. With simple lines and areas of flat color, she captures the moment when she learns that her friend came to her grandmother’s room to meet the boy next door. Her friend sits on the bed and interacts with the boy by the window as her grandmother watches them from the chair. Feeling bored, the young Garza braids the bedspread fringe on the side of the bed. The sense of space is flattened by the combined use of outlines and color blocks. According to the author, Garza intentionally exaggerated the linear quality of her work to mimic that of the retablo and ex voto traditions of New Mexico. 
Retablos and ex votos are both outlined and flat in their coloration. The difference is that retablos are small devotional images of saints, whereas ex votos are small paintings of historic people. Garza’s work possesses qualities found in both retablos and ex votos. By referencing the flatness of retablos, Garza elevates her depiction of the daily life of her family to something sacred like retablos. At the same time, her depiction of this past memory reminds the viewer of ex votos, on which great people from the past are depicted. 
Moreover, in the painting, Garza is celebrating her family in the same manner historic people are celebrated on ex votos. And by painting works with similar formal qualities to retablos, Garza renders her depiction of her family in a sacred way and establishes a one-to-one dialogue between image and viewer about the Mexican American’s notion of family.