Week 7 Ana Serrano

Ana Serrano is a first generation Mexican-American visual artist born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She attended Art Center College of Design and went on to tour her work nationally and internationally since graduating in 2008. Her work references the architecture of space and its influence on the environment by making entire dioramas entirely of colorful cardboard and paper. Her work has strong ties to Latino neighborhoods across the US and she pulls from her Los Angeles upbringing to create works that investigate the socio-cultural and spatial elements of urban life. The contrast between man made and natural elements coalesce in her works in a playful tension. The simplicity and detail of her work is refreshingly strong. In this work, buildings are compiled on top of each other, to represent the close contact and layering involved in city life. Her work borders on domesticana by using household items like cardboard and paper to construct entire worlds. The fragility of the colorful paper on cardboard, its inherent flimsiness is contrasted by a solidity of the structure she creates. The thought, planning and time taken to execute these cardboard structures must be all consuming. The complexity she creates using such simple materials is astounding. Now living in Portland, Oregon, I wonder how the role of migration plays into her work. Living away from her original home of Los Angeles, I wonder if these structures are also now a portable memory of home: that even though these sculptures can symbolize all barrios across the US, that her creations also strengthen her connection to home and space.

Week 10 Reflection

This class is very important to me because it is a very important cultural staple for many of my friends. I walk away from this course able to describe and connect with a Chicana sensibility and greatly appreciate the craft and philosophy encouraged by a Chicana existence. After experiencing live talks with Prof. Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Ofelia Esparza, I am able to appreciate the knowledge and values embodied in these radical individuals. Through their art, they created networks of community and change by supporting the people and voices of their land. I think that this class taught me about the utility, adaptability, and survivance of the Chicana identity. I have discovered a greater respect by focusing my Final Presentation and Paper on seminal and influential Chicana artists in history. Although they may not be fully seen in the mainstream canon, I know now that I see them and that they exist. They have always existed, through resistance, resiliency, and perseverance. I hope to continue exploring and learning more about Chicana artistry and its evolution. I look forward to engaging in thoughtful discussions with my friends about the ideas and concepts I have taken from this course. Above all, I hope to incorporate the knowledge offered by the Chicana existence into my own artistic practice. How can we embody the tension, sensuousness, and awkwardness found in the exchange between different identities? How can we navigate the uncomfortable difference that can actually become a celebration of our existence? How can we use art to empower the people and counteract the oppressive impersonal forces like patriarchy and whiteness that dominate our landscape? Thank you for an insightful quarter!  

Week 5 Carmen Lomas Garza

Cortez writes that Garza’s work offers “contemporary dialogue with the past as well as a reaffirmation of cultural continuity” (58). One of the many strong currents of this work is to reconcile and affirm Chicano identity in conversation with pre-Columbian culture. Garza draws from a Native imagination in her work Homenaje a Tenochtitlán: An Installation for the Day of the Dead (Homage to Ancient Mexico City and Doña Marina, “La Malinche”) (1992). She creates a blueprint of the imagination with a seven-foot multitiered red pyramid at the end of a black causeway. To walk down the path is to walk through history. Along the causeway are small red altars and marigolds with black paper cutouts on the walls of the flora y fauna native to Mexico. The countless details and thought put into this work make the space sacred as the work conjures entire narratives of conquest, domination, death, reverence, and understanding. Her reference in her altar to Malinche draws on a controversial historical figure in her community to center the Mesoamerican figure in her narrative during the world’s Quincentenary. During this time, Garza focuses her message to champion and connect Indigenous practices with her Chicana community.

Garza celebrates friends and artistic collaborations. There is a strong sense of collectivity in her work; and her career, described by Cortez, illustrates the people in her life who have offered much guidance and support in her artistic mission. Like a cultural mediator with her work, Garza’s art pieces offer a space for dialogue and affirmation of her community’s identity. By featuring the strong collective imagination, she visualizes the hope and perseverance of her identity to undermine social and political prejudice.

Week 8 Monica Kim Garza

Monica Kim Garza is a Mexican-Korean visual artist with a strong social media base who uses her voice to show a utopia for bodies and characters traditionally villainized or deemed worthless in mainstream depictions. Garza draws on themes of body positivity and radical self love to celebrate women and people of all shapes and colors. She depicts full figured bodies of color roaming in utopic paradise, carefree and full of life. This kind of utopic vision that Garza creates is championed by the tens of thousands of followers on her Instagram. I think what is notable about Monica Kim Garza and her work is the influence of her celebration and her famed reception on social media. This makes me consider the ability of social media and the internet to strengthen community networks, and also how the internet actively attempts to silence certain communities. Machines made by humans carry the same prejudices. Garza uses the internet to forward her creative practice. In addition, her multinational cultural upbringing shows the diverse future that potentially awaits us. Meaning, her works of art are image-texts for liberation and Garza excavates a space determined by cooperation and sensitivity for love’s sake. I also appreciate Garza because of her multicultural existence and the expansion of the Chicana identity to further a world not separated by national boundaries. What I have come to appreciate about Chicana arts is that it is not focused on or separated by location, but is a philosophy of existence and creation that transcends borders, just like Garza.

Week 9 Judy Baca

When researching more into Judy Baca, I learned about the SPARC program that facilitated the development of The Great Wall of Los Angeles. This mile long mural project highlights the voices and perspectives of Native, women, and minority communities. Taking many years to come to fruition, using the Los Angeles community of scholars, activists, artists, and students, Baca proves that art has the ability to strengthen social networks as an active site of resistance against large impersonal forces like patriarchy and racism. Traditionally silenced voices have a place in Baca’s vision. In this way, Baca demonstrates Art’s capacity to motivate, heal, and encourage spaces to reflect the perspectives and visions of the community in which the art is situated. Representation plays a critical role in the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), founded in 1976 by painter Christina Schlesinger and filmmaker Donna Deith, and artist/activist Baca. A quote I found that I think best represents Baca’s artistic philosophy is: "The murals were integral to Venice. SPARC was right here doing the work and transforming our jail from a place of oppression to a kind spot of liberation, the spot of hope." Art as action. Art as power. Art as knowledge. With these truths to support a critical artistic practice in Los Angeles, Baca creates worlds that are honest, open, and transformative. Bringing Art into the world and into the public landscape transforms our spatial experience; The Great Wall of Los Angeles offers a site of resistance and resiliency from the future voices of Los Angeles.  

Week 4 Response

Rasquachismo is a specifically Chicano sensibility that is later expanded in Mesa-Bains’ text to include a feminine rasquachismo: Domesticana. The sensibility, even more elusive than an idea, is a self-referential term that celebrates the working class attitudes of the everyday Chicano/a. According to Ybarra-Frausto, it is a “logic of taste” (85) based on the tragicomic nature of the barrio, an affected kitsch that represents more than the mass cultural significance of its materials. Rasquachismo is embodied. It is an active logic that feeds the Chicano imagination and influences a Chicanx navigation of the world. It has inspired the visual, performing, and language arts. The materials, found and recycled, ornament and embellish that which has been considered insignificant and worthless to mainstream society. To be rasquache is to be funky and inventive, wild and alive on the fringes of cultural production. The knowledge offered by the rasquache, exemplified in the characters of the peladito or peladita, encourages improvisation and resilience in the face of increasing oppression.

Domesticana is the female subversion of the historically male dominated sensibility of rasquachismo. Responding to the day to day experience of working class Chicanas, artists like Patssi Valdez and Amalia Mesa-Bains urgently expand the vocabulary of rasquachismo to include those voices. Domesticana plays with themes of displacement and migration to challenge the domestic space in which Chicanas are historically placed. By charging the domestic space with bawdy statements, an artist employing Domesticana overwhelms the space with the potential for liberation. The hyperfeminization in presentation constructs a resistant attitude that is affirmed through recombinations of identity.

Week 3 Eclipse (1981) Yolanda Lopez

Jack Ironstone

1/23/2020

Week #3

            Yolanda Lopez offers a wealth of space to investigate Chicana identity with a queer framework. Themes such as multidimensionality and play resonate with me strongly in her work. In Eclipse (1981), López plays with Guadalupe as an active site of negotiation with religion, politics, and culture that seriously impacts women’s lives. The characters in the work: Saturn, Guadalupe, Indigenous Guadalupe, and the Runner pair juxtapose each other in a spatial hierarchy such that the Runner pair is at the top while the traditional Guadalupe figure is at the bottom. Outlining the bottom of the collage is a series of rhyming photographs of the planet Saturn, suggesting a uniformity and ‘othered’ lens: to be looking at the planet on different land. At the top with the Runner pair is the planet Saturn in whole solitude, suggesting an independence both in size and in contrast. López reveals the limited nature of the Traditional Guadalupe in Eclipse by pairing two versions of the Virgin together to critique the conservative religio-patriarchy that shows women as bound. Juxtaposing the double-set Virgin is the Indigenous, liberated counterpart, whose physical intimacy with her child is emphasized by a red aura that pushes her out of the frame. She cannot be contained. The double set of the Runner, independent and skin-showing, also potentially running from the frame, illustrates the call to embrace the full spectrum of Chicana identity to celebrate existence. Eclipse weaves together ideas of gender, liberation, and space in a work that serves as a compass to the future for which López dreams. 

Artist Presentation 2020 Ironstone

I would like to research Pauline Oliveros with Alison Knowles. Together in 1974, they created Postcard Theatre, a postcard series with challenging and wild female-centered statements.