Week 10 Reflection

When I first arrived at UCLA 3 and a half years ago, I would have never imagined that I'd end up in the Chicano Studies department, let alone have the opportunity to take a studio art course within the field. From the get-go week one where we did the class activity on coming up with artists and categorizing them as male, female, or non-identifying, if became very clear that even as a collective, our knowledge on artists was overwhelmingly on male artists like Picasso, Dali, and Michaelangelo. On top of being male-dominated, the list we came up with was very Anglo-dominated. From that moment, I knew that my knowledge on Chicana and non-mainstream artists would greatly evolve and expand over the following months.

And I was absolutely correct. Throughout the course, some themes that were very pertinent to me in the artists we examined included the questioning of cultural practices and figures in the Chicanx/Latinx community and their re-imaginations and reconstructions, as well as the role of activism and political commentary in art. With presentations like Ofelia Esparza's and in my artist research project on Margarita Cabrera, I also got an understanding of the importance and impact of community art for the sake of uplifting and telling stories. Additionally, now, when I stroll around East LA and when I go back home and I'm strolling around Oakland or the Mission in San Francisco, I can come across murals and be able to identify the artist who created them and the meaning behind the art.

Lastly, I really enjoyed the studio art component of this course. My art creation abilities really only go as far as collaging and from time to time, video editing, but through this course, I learned and improved at a lot of the skills that are fundamental to visual art. I appreciated learning techniques like shading and looking at real life objects (like hands) and trying to replicate them on paper, and really noticed that over the course of the quarter, I made a lot of improvements and created some art that I'm proud of. 

Thank you so much to Professor Lopez Garspar de Alba, Paola, and to all of my classmates for sharing your stories and art with me!