Gavazza, Emmalee (Extra Credit)

I enjoyed learning about Dr. Judy Baca and her work in the world of art. My artist for my Wikipedia project was Pilar Agüero-Esparza, another Chicana artists who uses her education and experience as a professional artist to help young artists find their voice and take pride in their identities. The work Dr. Baca is doing in schools strikes me as absolutely vital. There is a lot of negative messaging and representation of all people of color right now in America, but as usual, Chicanx kids are particularly exposed to negative stereotypes and portrayals of “people who look like me” as unwanted or underappreciated members of society. When Dr. Baca said that she always starts her primary school art lessons by helping students “find a color that reminds them of them, and then… tell them over and over that it’s beautiful, that it’s beauty,” I found that to be a profound statement. Her activist art education will undeniably play a role in helping the young people she teaches reimagine their skin color, their features, their cultural backgrounds, and their ethnic identities as something to be celebrated rather than as a source of shame or exclusion. I also appreciated Dr. Baca’s comments on the nature of different art media, for instance, her thoughts on the nature of murals. When she said that a mural was “not simply decorative art,” but a piece that was “integrated into the architecture, not an easel painting made large but a work integrated into the place, into the moment in time that it’s painted,” I was reminded of some of the critical scholarship provided by Claudia Zapata and others we’ve studied in this class. The emphasis on place, moment, and representing “the people” as they exist in a specific point in time seems to be an important theme for many contemporary Chicana artists. Learning about Dr. Baca provided me with another important point of reference for how that tradition is being played out, both in schools and throughout U.S. cities, today.