Reflection Post: Avianna Wooten

Well I don't really know where to start other than thank you. Thank you Professor for creating a really comprehensive learning environment. Not only did we learn more about Chicana artists, art practices and movements, but we also mirrored those difficult practices in our own sketchbook. The sketchbook in this course was one of the most exciting and anxiety inducing segments of this class. I have no experience at all with drawing and I really didn't want to mess up such a beautiful japanese moleskine album sketchbook (just the title alone sounds expensive). Nevertheless, I started to have more fun with the sketchbook despite its difficulty.

Me when we got assigned the self portrait in our sketchbook. 

I also really enjoyed the guest presentations in Week 10. All of the research presented reflected both expertise and passion. Though I know the undergrad presenters aren't experts yet their work reflected a critical engagement with art that creates space for marginalized people. I really liked the part of Evelyn's presentation when she brings up how just defining the word "decolonizing" was beyond the scope of her short presentation, or what spatial entitlement means. (I just name dropped Evelyn but I truly LOVED everyone's presentation of their work and if I tried to explain everything I loved I that would be an essay rather than a blog post.

While we're on the topic of presentations, I really appreciated seeing all of your artist presentations. Those two weeks were my favorite part of the class. It was amazing to be introduced to new art but I also liked how each artist reflected a student's own personal interest. I am really thankful to all of you for being so open during the artist presentation and brave during the presentation of your own work. I got a little teary eyed(don't judge me) listening to some of your inspiration for your final art assignment in the sketchbook. People talked about the love of their family, the fatigue of searching for one's own identity(despite being mired in a complicated web of being), and of course different expressions of love and beauty. 

Thank you Professor for creating such a wonderful class, and thank you to my peers for participating in this journey with me. Also congrats to Class of 2018!!!!

Thank you all for everything.

Artist Presentation: Monica Kim Garza

Monica Kim Garza is another artist who stood out to during the presentations. After the presentation I found her on artsy and Instagram and I’ve been social media stalking her work ever since. To be honest the first thing that stood out to me were the female bodies. These women were varying shades of brown and really curvy. As a black woman from the south these were the body types that surrounded me. My mom has a tiny waist, a big but, and thicker thighs. These paintings are how the women in my family look and it felt nice to see that represented in art.

Also this art reminded me of my own body. This is kind of funny to share on an academic blog but by 4^th grade I had basically gone through all of puberty. The body I had then is very similar to the body I have now. One of my friends in fourth grade, who was a very sweet girl, told me “Avianna your body would be perfect if your thighs weren’t so huge.” To be fair that comment did not hurt my feelings at all.  Even though those words didn’t hurt me it was the first time I had ever noticed that my thighs were bigger. I said all of that to say, that I can really envision my own body, femininity, and sexuality in her art.

I can’t find much information about Garza's upbringing and art online, but I remember my classmate saying that Garza is mixed race and she intentionally made figures racially ambiguous and curvy.

Artist Presentation: ISIS RODRÍGUEZ

Figure 1. Be All that You Can Be, Isis Rodriguez (1997) Acrylic Gouache and India Ink on Bristol

Isis Rodriguez was born and raised in the United States. Her father is Mexican, and her mother is Puerto Rican. In 1997 she worked as an exotic dancer in San Francisco to investigate sex positive feminism. From her experiences and proximity to sex work she created the controversial series "My Life as a Comic Stripper". This series was a satirical commentary on the experiences of exotic dancers and focused on decentering the question of sex work around a moral issue but rather a labor issue.

In Be All that You Can Be there is a female soldier situated at the forefront of the image protecting various figures in the background. One figure in the background of the random assortment of women is La Virgen de Guadalupe. We can see that she is La Virgen de Guadalupe because she has a halo representing divinity and she is cloaked in a green robe while praying. Right next to the La Virgen de Guadalupe two very sexualized figures.  These women look like they are exotic dancers and given the subject matter of the series that is a safe assumption, but they could also just be women embracing their sexuality. Nonetheless, the commentary of painting is that the soldier is defending all forms of female identity.

Rodriguez describes her cartoon style as classical art. "In animation, hand drawn cartoons are referred to as 'classical.' Though many consider the cartoon lowbrow  or pop art, I believe the cartoon to be the modern classical figure. The cartoon is an elegant, minimalistic drawing of the realistic figure, and the realistic figure is just an over-rendered cartoon. " Rodriguez uses her minimalistic style and mixes it interestingly with realism in her series “Legends from the Land of Nepantla" Nepantla is conflict ridden plain in our own minds, where self reflection is incorporated into confrontantion and sometimes hope and love. Interestingly Rodriguez did not shy away from incorporating her cartoon figure of Eve from a different series.

Judy Baca: Re-imagining the past and future

Figure 1. World Wall Schematic drawing

figure 2. World Wall: A vision of the Future without fear

Judith Baca is a Chicana muralist, teacher and activist. Baca was heavily involved in the 70s with the Chicano Civil rights movement, the Women's Liberation movement, and anti Vietnam war protests. Baca describes her youth as "a time when everybody was working really hard at just being American." But  what does it mean to be American?  Baca's mural The Great Wall of Los Angeles answers this question by showing entangled histories of America. In one panel we can see a highway cutting through communities displacing homes and segregating people. In another panel we see a Hollywood sign with an enlarged Nixon looming over the film industry as entertainment executives point fingers at people being hurled into a pit. Visually the Great Wall of Los Angeles is a spectacular mural with vivid colors, swirling distorted forms, and an poignant look at complex overlapping histories.

While The Great Wall unveils concealed and overlooked histories the World Wall envisions new possibilities for the future. World Wall: A Vision of the Future without Fear illustrates the transformative possibilities of humanity when people refashion their world view and orient themselves towards peace. Peace in World Wall is illustrated through a process starting with the self and ending with international balance centered on spiritual growth and redirecting technology away from violence(like the military industrial complex) and into a cleaner world.  Balance between spiritual and material are illustrated in the schematic plans for the mural and at the center is a universal peace. 

As a history major I think the work Baca does to illuminate hidden histories is important and starts the process of redressing the lingering suffering of the past. But there does come a point where we need to look forward and start thinking seriously about what a better world really looks like. 

Looking at the Past While Pointing Forward: Carmen Lomas Garza

Carmen Lomas Garza, Camas para Sueños, 1985, gouache on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, © 1985

One piece that illustrates the dichotomy between both remembrance and dreaming is Garza’s Cama Para Suenos(1985). This image depicts a moment from Garza’s childhood where her mother is making the bed while Garza sits on top of the roof with her sister. As her mother spreads the sheet across the bed, Garza points to the sky dreaming of becoming an artist. This image was painted with gouache on paper and although this scene depicts a memory it seems to more so represent the space of dreams or hopes. The juxtaposition between mother and daughters isn’t a direct memory(The viewer can’t be certain that the young Carmen Lomas Garza is aware that her mother is beneath her at the exact moment where she points to the sky) but rather a reimagined moment. Young Garza pointing to the sky seems to beckon the viewer to look towards greater possibilities. All of the imaginative possibilities of dreaming are couched within nostalgia and a precise moment of Garza’s past. I love her work because in my opinion she's able to convey a full range of imaginative possibilities while contemplating very personal memories. Everyone in her more personal paintings exist in relationship to each other, and they also exists as more than victims of oppression. Her paintings are simplistically beautiful yet they show the complexity of Mexican community.

Stories your Mother Never Told You, Alvarez Munoz

Stories your Mother Never Told You, Alvarez Munoz’s contribution to the Snug Harbor Cultural Center’s exhibit entitled Family Stories, builds upon the theme of a multiplicity of narratives coexisting uneasily together. One portion of Munoz’s contribution, “wonder cabinet”, is a nod at 16^th and 17^th century collecting habits that positioned objects of curiosity together tightly in a room with no regard to subject matter. A fine art sculpture could be placed on the same shelf as a stuffed carcass in a 16^th century wonder cabinet. Similarly, Munoz’s cabinet has several drawers that seam incongruent in theme, yet all tell stories of personhood. One drawer is filled with individual accounts of memories, while another is filled with dental casts. Looming over the cabinet is a tree of life, which biblically is a tree of knowledge, painted on the wall behind the cabinet. Visually the tree of life seems to grow from the cabinet implying that knowledge grows from a variety of understandings of the world. However, this multiplicity of understandings is not readily reconcilable to the viewer. Perhaps the cabinet represents a hierarchical form of knowledge, an epistemological question, or maybe a dialogic understanding of memory.

"Out of the House, the Halo, and the Whore’s Mask"

Professor Alicia Gaspar de Alba starts Chapter 3 of in Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition with the subtitle “Out of the House, the Halo, and the Whore’s Mask: The Mirror of Malinchismo.”This subtitle introduces the reader to the essentialist tropes of Chicana femininity that reduce women to either the whore/virgin/mother. This virgin/whore/mother paradigm lacks complexity, and fails to incorporate the full range of female personhood. Additionally, sexuality for women within these tropes becomes attached to duties, or desires, outside of the women herself.

César Martinez, La Fulana (The Other Woman), 1985. Oil on canvas, 70 x 60 inches. 

Despite the function of the vigin/whore/mother trichotomy to prescribe personal identity, this paradigm is not a woman’s reflection of self but rather a projection imposed on a woman's sense of self.  Take for example, Cesar Martinez’s La Fulana(The Other Woman). The “other woman” is not a title created by the woman herself, and the painting is a reflection of how Martinez imagines the woman. Deeply personal activities for women, such as motherhood and sexuality, become collectively regulated, and identity becomes publicly prescribed within the virgin/whore/mother paradigm. 

Blake: Counter Memory

The women of discord for Mexica people were important aspects of indigenous origin stories, and explanations of political elite male dominance. “However, the Chicana, and U.S. Mexicana oral, written, and artistic refigurings of the four cultural symbols can be read as late-twentieth-and-early-twenty-first-century disruptions of national, patriarchal, and colonial rule”(Blake 14). These four prolific female cultural symbols exhibit the devaluation of femininity as they are made out to be either bloodthirsty(Mexica Goddesses), disloyal(La Malinche), insane(La Llorona), or ideally silent(La Virgen de Guadalupe). Meanwhile, there is no shortage in cultural memory of male heroes to idolize. By recasting these important women, Chicana and U.S Mexicana artists are redesigning how women are socialized to behave. When artists expand the constrictive ideologies associated with femininity, they are creating space for themselves where there was none before.

Presentation: Xandra Ibarra

" I hope to implicate and overwhelm the audience with my racial melancholia. I want to illuminate how performing racially perverse material often fails because it is read and embodied as reality by my (white) audiences. I do this by juxtaposing the rumored death of Lupe Velez, the original Hollywood Mexican “Spitfire” who purportedly died with her head in the toilet, with the life of La Chica Boom. My hope is to present these stories side by side in order to foreshadow the destiny of my burlesque personae. Although I don’t resolve my actual life with death as Lupe did, I propose that the afterlife of La Chica Boom will be lived as a cockroach; reviled, untamable, and always pregnant with yet another disciplined reality."
-Xandra Ibbara

http://stanceondance.com/2012/09/24/an-interview-with-seth-eisen-and-xandra-ibarra/

Wooten, Avianna

  Hello Everyone,

I grew up primarily in Jacksonville Florida and I transferred to UCLA in 2016. In the Summer of 2017 I had an internship at the Getty that introduced me more thoroughly to Chicanx Art.. It just so happened that Harry Gamboa Jr. was wrapping up his residency at the Getty, and the Public Programs department was planning a night of playful insurrections to celebrate his contributions as an artist. This event was intended to be fun while simultaneously provoking a forum of serious thought around urgent issues. I asked to be a part of this project, so I got a chance to do research on Chicanx artists. This research prompted more urgent questions for me.

I mean what exactly is Chicanx Art? I remembered reading people, who were Mexican, lambasting a member of Maricon and saying “this is NOT Chicanx Art!” Or even Asco’s stint with LACMA begs the question of how do Chicanx artists move in a world that was grafted around white male subjectivity. Chicanx Art for me is heterogenous and far from monolithic. Yet from "It's Not About the Santa in My Fe, but the Santa Fe in My Santa" we can see that there is an investment for some people to project certain images of what it means to be Chicanx. Anyways, I’m excited to have a chance to hear your perspectives and learn more about Chicana artists.