Thursday, February 6, 2020

2020CroshawHannah Week 5: Codex Lomas Garza: Pedacito de Mi Corazón

In my short essay on Carmen Lomas Garza, I was interested in analyzing her piece, Codex Lomas Garza: Pedacito de Mi Corazón, from 1992, as this piece shows Garza’s continued political art-making practice as an adult. In this piece, Garza uses moments between her family members to combine her own personal narrative in conjunction with a larger Mexican-American narrative. The Codex she created was a part of a show titled, The Chicano Codices: Encountering Art & the Americas which opened at San Francisco’s Mexican Museum from September 23 through November 29, 1992.(Cortez, Carmen Lomas Garza, 61.) This piece, and the art show, were organized as a protest show against America’s celebration and economic endeavors that took advantage of the Quincentenary, the 500-year anniversary of the European encounter with the Americas. Artists like Garza, “viewed the Quincentenary as an opportunity to address the historical omissions and to reinsert themselves and the groups they represented into the timeline of the hemisphere.”(Cortez, Carmen Lomas Garza, 61.) She uses gouache and watercolor to create her own codex, remembering the violent actions of colonizers’ burning existing codices in the Americas or stealing and sending surviving books back to Europe for private collections. Throughout she draws plants and animals used for specific medicinal properties, information passed down through Mexican-American culture, and incorporates symbols like the ollin, an Aztec symbol that represents, ‘change,’ or, ‘movement,’ followed by a passage Garza wrote herself that, “touches upon history, culture, and the implications of the past and present.”(Cortez, Carmen Lomas Garza, 64.) Garza continues to add details to her work that simultaneously make it personal narrative, such as the scene of her mother applying aloe to Garza’s brother’s sunburnt skin on panel 6, and her grandfather’s hands harvesting cactus pads on panel 4. The fluid combination of personal and communal narrative makes Garza’s piece exceptionally accessible; it’s an effective balance that roots her stories within her art in truth, but that also speak to a larger audience.

I'd like to add on a more informal note that I've been a really big fan of Carmen Lomas Garza's work so far. I enjoy painting scenes that end up combining lots of different characters and figures interacting with each other in different settings, but Garza's work is inspiring to me because of the very specific settings she uses, the details she'll include in her paintings, and the cultural specificity that some of those details hold. Her Codex is inspiring because it functions similarly to her paintings in that it lays out a lot of interesting information and personal experiences but in a different kind of organization of information than a painting.






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