Quiroz, Madison

Hi everyone! My name is Madison Quiroz (she/her/hers). I'm a fourth year transfer student with a major in Art History and a minor in Chicanx and Central American Studies. I started taking Chicano Studies courses in community college and fell in love with learning about my culture in ways I never had before. I soon learned that they were a great supplement to a lot of the art history courses I was taking, and when I transferred to UCLA I decided to take on the Chicanx and Central American Studies minor. While I don’t have any specific research interests as of now, I’d love to work for a museum, non-profit, or archive/research library that focuses on Chicanx and Latin American sources. 

As a Chicana artist, this course was especially appealing to me. I create art with ballpoint pens and a lot of my artistic practice includes traditional Chicano/a iconography. My artistic practice is closely tied to my culture, so much so that sometimes I don’t know what my art would be without cultural influence. I’ve taken art history classes that focus on Mexico or parts of Latin America, but never Chicanx artists, so I am extremely interested in expanding my knowledge about the kind of art Chicanx artists have created and continue to make. I feel that this course will be a great foundation to build upon for the work I hope to do, and I’m excited for the opportunity to learn about predecessors and the impact they’ve had. 

With regards to the reading, I thought the focus on social political art was especially interesting. This is often what comes to mind when I think about Chicanx art, with places such as the Center for the Study of Political Graphics coming to mind. I love how lots of the origins of what is now known as Chicanx art is rooted in social and political motives, often for utilitarian rather than aesthetic purposes. 

Overall, I’m very excited to take this course and (virtually) meet my peers and learn under Professor Alma!