Final Blog Post

Prior to taking this course, I had no knowledge on Chicana Art and Chicana Artists. So, when we were asked to name artists we knew, I could only name the well-known American and European artists; however, now I am proud to say that I can name several artists and even explain their art works to others. Through our art presentations, I even found my favorite Chicana artist, Liliana Wilson, who I presented on. Over the 10 weeks, I have learned a lot about Chicana Art. I have learned that Chicana Art is not only an art, but also a form of art that tells a story. That has meanings, especially personal stories of artists’ themselves and their family, which I found very interesting. Throughout taking this course, I am glad that I also got to learn about Chicana culture and the important figures in their lives, such as La Virgen de Guadalupe. Living in Los Angeles, I have seen La Virgen several times, but did not really know who she was and what she meant to people, but learning about her in class got me to understand the meaning of La Virgen and I learned to appreciate such figure living among us. Overall, I really enjoyed taking this course and I believe this is my favorite course at UCLA so far! I loved learning about Chicana Artists and their art works and I especially enjoyed creating our art project books. Drawing and painting really did take my mind off the stressfulness in my life, and I learned I am actually not that bad in drawing! Thank you for a great quarter Professor Lopez J

Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving this year, my family was invited to a Thanksgiving dinner that my mom’s friend was going to have, so on Thanksgiving night, my family headed to my mom’s friend’s house. When we arrived, the cooking was on going so my mom and I helped prepare and serve the dishes onto the table. For my drawing, I decided to draw the dinner table with the Thanksgiving food on it. There was a lot of food, which have not made it onto the table, but I tried to include as much as possible in the drawing. I would say the subject of my drawing is the dinner table with the food. Around the table, I placed several people, but as a viewer, you can only see the back of their heads or part of their legs and arms. The reason behind this was due to the fact that I am not much of an artist when it comes to drawing people; although I did include a side profile of a person on the left side. Like Carmen Lomas Garza, I tried to make my drawing as colorful as it can be and colored in the drawings with the watercolor pencils and used a wet paintbrush to go over the colors.

Natalia Anciso

The work I chose to write about for week 8 is Natalia Anciso’s Joe. Joe is Anciso’s work from 2011, created by pen, watercolor and embroidery on fabric. It features a man presumable named “Joe” hanging from the top in black and white, while colorful flowers surround the borders. When I first saw this image during the class presentations, I was curious to what the story behind this work might be. It seemed gruesome in some way, yet somehow looked bright due to the bold colors of the flowers. When I looked it up on Anciso’s website, it is said that Joe is part on an ongoing series called the Pinches Rinches, where Anciso looks at the suppressed historical events surrounding the executions and lynchings of Mexicans and Tejanos by Texas Rangers along the Texas Borderlands, post-Texas Revolution. I think it is very interesting how Natalia Anciso took these two very opposite images and formed it to fit into one form of art. The bright, bold colors of the flowers contrast the hanging figure and I believe it makes the scene more dramatic; somewhat sad, yet beautiful. I looked through Anciso’s other works in the Pinches Rinches series, and I really like how she uses the bright watercolors to contrast the black and white images of rangers and the people.  

Week 7: Laura Aguilar

From the class presentations, the artist that stood out to me the most is Laura Aguilar. The image I chose for the blog is a black and white photography of Aguilar lying sideways on the ground among big rocks. Aguilar’s positioning of her body seems to blend in with the rocks positioned in front of her and makes herself part of the nature of the background. At first, seeing her works of photography made me feel uncomfortable due to her being naked in all of them, but hearing her talk about herself in the video we watched in class made me think differently on who she is as a person and her ways of expressing herself as a form of art. One thing that I still remember from the video is when she talked about the reason why she photographs her naked body. Aguilar says she likes the sun’s rays “touching” her body because she has not been “touched” physically in real life, which I think she is referring to having a loving relationship. That made me understand how things could be interpreted in different ways and once I thought about it, by photographing her naked body, Aguilar was embracing herself in the wild life and was being embraced by nature itself, which I thought was interesting.  

Carmen Lomas Garza

Incorporating her family in her art works is a way Garza projects positive images of the Chicano culture. Sandía/ Watermelon is a painting from 1986, created by gouache on paper.  This painting features Garza’s family, which includes her parents, grandparents, and siblings, out on the front porch of their home, enjoying watermelon under the moonlit sky. An interesting part of this painting is that Garza uses a method called “zoom-ins”, to recreate “focused examinations of particular details” in a separate painting, which derives from an eralier painting (Cortez, 48). Sandía from the Pedacito de Mi Corazón series (1986), is a “zoom-in” from Sandía/ Watermelon and it symbolizes the “core “or “heart” of the watermelon which is known to be the sweetest part (Cortez, 49). Relating to the love for her family, this illustrates the conspicuous point of the chapter, which is “familial unity and affection” (Cortez, 49). I enjoyed Garza’s artworks because it felt as if each and every one of them were telling a story by their images. How people are portrayed and placed in the images made me further develop a theory or an idea to what is going on in her paintings and what she is trying to tell to her audiences.