Week 9 Judy Baca

One artist I was excited to learn about during the presentations last week was Judy Baca. To start, I've heard her name quite a few times after attending the UCLA arts department or almost four years now, so it was interesting to get an in depth understanding of her life and work. Baca founded LA's first murals program which has since created over 400 murals. Baca creates artwork that encompasses history, people, and place to comment Chicanx communities. Baca's most well known piece is titled Great Wall of Los Angeles. This mural, which is the largest in the world, recruited hundreds of artists and community members to support it. This act alone turned something from her artwork to our artwork, which is monumental in creating a stronger community. This massive mural covers over 6 city blocks! From start to finish, this amazing mural depicts the history of California as seen through the eyes of minorities and women. Personally, I chose to write about this for my blog post because I think the significance behind the mural is so important. Similar to the artist I chose, Yreina Cervantez, Judy Baca wears her heritage on her sleeve, loud and proud. Her artwork is her history, it's her people and it's her community. I hope to be able to visit the Great Wall of Los Angeles and see first hand this amazing mural.

Camille Mohsenin Week 8

Melissa Depaz was one artist who stood out to me during the presentations. I immediately was drawn to her interesting style of artwork, bright colors, and cultural significance. First, I love that it's somewhat challenging to decipher which medium she is working in. She is a mixed media artist, but specific pieces, like the one below, is so intriguing because it's hard to tell if its paint, digital, or printmaking. I suspect its a mixture of many different forms of artwork. Additionally, there are such bright colors throughout the painting that it is enjoyable to look at and each different part pulls the viewer in. In this image in particular, I love that the sky is painted different shades of blue in a blocking format. Lastly, Depaz is from Compton and regularly uses it as a background for her artwork or somehow integrates it into the work. I appreciate this so much because I think it's important to be aware of your community and include them in future success that you may have. In addition, it is clear that Compton has fully shaped her as a person so it's great to see that her art is shaped by it as well. The cultural modifiers of the image: Dale's Donuts, I710, Patria coffee, and others are key symbols that represent her background and community.

Week 7: Yreina Cervantez

The artist I am presenting on is Yreina Cervantez, born in Kansas but raised in California. She gained a lot of artistic inspiration from her mother, her childhood, and life as a Chicana woman. Cervantez specializes in multimedia painting, murals, and printmaking. Her most well known art piece is the mural titled La Ofrenda which can be found under a bridge on 2nd and Toluca in DTLA. This mural, which was commissioned to honor Chicanas and their heritage, was unfortunately tagged multiple times. Because it wasn't protected the first time Cervantez made it, this mural continued to get graffitied on. However, a restoration process was soon underway to bring life back to this amazing mural. Using a process titled 'controlled delamination', which allows the team to delaminate the surface paint layers, one color at a time, while another set affects the binder in paint, causing it to shrivel and craze. This process removes the tagged graffiti while somewhat preserving what is underneath. Even after this process, a local pastor hired a graffiti artist to paint over the entire mural! As one article explains, “[The pastor] admitted that the whole incident was a terrible mistake on his part and offered to support the conservation efforts in any way he could. He apologized to [Yreina] numerous times and has since then been very helpful and generous in supporting the restoration of ‘La Ofrenda.’” Luckily, Cervantez came back to the site of her mural and repainted the beautiful mural, which is now protected.

Week 6: Sketchbook Cover

I originally wanted to draw an eye on my sketchbook cover because it was the first thing I learned to draw. It's my go to when I have a chance to doodle and something I feel confident drawing. I also like the meaning behind it and what it's carried in my life - to approach everything with wide eyes and a curious heart. This thinking has pushed me to travel to places I was previously nervous about and experience new things whenever possible.
More recently, I've found a (somewhat joking) love for the spookier, magical side of life. Not that I actually do magic myself, but I find those who can so fun. I also think conspiracy theories and the sort are very intriguing. Because of these two things together, I decided to draw the illuminati symbol on my cover. I think the look of it originally is really cool, and I like that it incorporates an eye in a more complex way. I will do a mix of these two images, because I like the center of the triangle on the left side and the sun/flower looking aspect of the right side.

Week 5 Camille Mohsenin

Reading and writing about Carmen Lomas Garza this week was both grounding and inspiring. I was so intrigued to read about her childhood in Texas and understand first hand accounts of deep rooted racism and segregation. At first, I was so shocked that she experienced what she had as a child that I was sure she must've been born much much earlier. After reading more, and realizing that no, that was just life in Texas for minorities in the 1950s and 60s, I was shocked. One story in particular stood out to me: during gym class, the Mexicanos and Black girls were pushed to one side of the locker room, overcrowded and uncomfortable. The young white girls were able to populate the other side, and take a shower first. Garza reflects on how she, and so many of her classmates, internalized this as them being dirty and degraded from these young white girls. Such a memory like this really captures the issues that span from institutionalized racism.
There were so many images of Garza's that I loved, but aside from the three I wrote about in my paper, her painting Quinceañera stands out to me. I am immediately drawn to the beautiful pink dresses making an arch around the old blue car. Although I have never been to a Quinceañera, from pictures and videos I have seen from them it seems to paint it perfectly. The eye never gets tired looking at this painting because there are always new details to see and figures to understand.

Week 4- Rasquachismo and Domesticana

Gathered from Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology, Rasquachismo is a paradigm in and of itself to put into words. The authors expressed how even the act of defining it is whats troubling about it, because it is more the essence of what the word is than the literal definition itself. It's an attitude, a viewpoint, a taste, the intricacies of Mexican vernacular traditions and the history of of los de abajo. One can be rasquache, in which they present a spunky attitude rooted in a deep manifestation of art and life in the Chicano community.

As a counterpart to rasquachismo, the authors present domesticana, a Chicana feminist reinterpretation of this idea. Domesticana has grown due to an increase in Chicana women taking a stand, affirmations of cultural values, and a resistance to women's restrictions within the culture. One of my favorite points made by the authors about domesticana is as follows: "To understand domesticana Chicana it is necessary to impose a criticality that places art production as more than reflective of ideology but rather as an art production that is constructive of ideology" (94). This argues that art is used as a tool to convey ideas, realities, and perspectives into life as a Chicana that would otherwise be silenced. Further, this domesticana incorporates aspects of the traditional gender roles imposed on women. For example, the use of the bedroom and kitchen both embody a centality and an inprisonment. The juxtaposition here posits these terms to allow for a reconstruction of their meaning, one that allows for Chicana women to gain power from them instead of being held down by them.

Camille Mohsenin Week 2

Professor Alicia Gaspar de Alba reflects on the traveling CARA exhibition, meant by its namesake to represent Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmations. As pointed out by Professor Alba, the exhibition falls radically short of that. Most notably, this exhibition lacks an inclusion of Chicana artists, such as las Mujeres Muralistas. Further, Prof Alba notes that there were far more male artists than female, which runs in line with "the fact that, in the early years of el Movimiento, more men were plying their artistic vocation that women" (125).

Additionally, what I find so surprising is the fact that exhibitions like this - one meant to be inclusive and representative of a population - falls so short or this inclusivity. How can an exhibition so drastically lack women's art?

Alba continues that one section of the exhibition, "Feminist Visions", is meant to display Chicana feminist art as a means to critique social issues. Although on their own they convey powerful messages about life as a Chicana, as a group it ends up reproducing the sexist ideology of el Movimiento. This is a prime example of how this exhibition as a whole falters - the intentions of the curators were unlikely malicious, but the final product was excusatory and lacking.

As the article writes, the dominant narratives of this exhibition are created by the organizers, which clearly lack a feminist view point. This leads me to wonder: How can curators avoid such large issues in the future, both with who they do and don't include and how they represent these people?

2020 Mohsenin,Camille Yolanda Lopez Piece

For this blog post, I chose to look closely at Yolanda Lopez's piece Self-Portrait that's one of three from her series "Tres Mujeres/Three Generations". In this self portrait, the artist draws herself standing with baggy clothes and glasses on, staring directly at the audience. In the other two drawings, one of her mother and one of her grandmother, she has them pose in a similar stance. I was originally drawn to this art piece because of how simply unique it is. It became abruptly aware after I thought about why I liked this particular image so much that it was because she is simply herself. Lopez isn't standing in a sexual, attention-seeking position, she isn't naked or wearing clothes or gazing at a male in the image. It's just her, in the mostly beautiful way.

After reading Davalos' analyses of this series, I learned that this was exactly her intention. Lopez created this series to contrast the hyper-sexualized illustrations women often are drawn as in art. In addition, Davalos discussed that Lopez was very inspired by sociological theory "that argues that body language conveys one's personality, sentiment, and unspoken attitudes" (65). Lopez used this series to create this relationship between herself, her mother, and her grandmother.

Yreina Cervantez

Hello! For this presentation, I am choosing to focus on Chicana artivist Yreina Cervántez because her multimedia painting, murals, and printmaking in conjunction with her feminist morals are very inspiring to me.