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Chicana art emerged as part of the Chicano Movement in the 1960s. It used art to express political and social resistance [1] through different art mediums. Chicana artists explore and interrogate traditional Mexican-American values and embody feminist themes through different mediums such as murals, painting, and photography. The momentum created from the Chicano Movement spurred a Chicano Renaissance among Chicanas and Chicanos. Artists voiced their concerns about oppression and empowerment in all areas of race, gender, class, and sexuality. [2] Chicana feminist artists and Anglo-feminist took a different approach in the way they collaborated and made their work during the 1970s. Chicana feminist artists utilized artistic collaborations and collectives that included men, while Anglo-feminist artists generally utilized women-only participants. [3] Art has been used as a cultural reclamation process for Chicana and Chicano artists allowing them to be proud of their roots by combining art styles to illustrate their multi-cultured lives.
The Woman's Building opened in Los Angeles, California in 1973. In addition to housing women-owned businesses, the center held multiple art galleries and studio spaces. Women of color, including Chicanas, historically experienced racism and discrimination within the building from white feminists. Not many Chicana artists were allowed to participate in the Woman's Building's exhibitions or shows. Chicana artists Olivia Sanchez and Rosalyn Mesquite were among the few included. Additionally, the group Las Chicanas exhibited Venas de la Mujer in 1976. [3]
In 1976, co-founders Judy Baca (the only Chicana), Christina Schlesinger, and Donna Deitch established the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). Judy Baca had noticed a lack of awareness toward women of color in her time in Venice, California and realized the difficulties as being a woman of color who is both a feminist and a Latina which prompted the creation of SPARC. [4] It consisted of studio and workshop spaces for artists. SPARC functioned as an art gallery and also kept records of murals. SPARC was created to support youth in areas where gangs are prevalent, which is why community youth was involved in the making of The Great Wall of Los Angeles. The Great Wall of Los Angeles was the first project made by SPARC showcasing topics of erasure of ethnic groups in California and homophobia. SPARC provides deeper context in the omission of underrepresented communities and elicits the exclusion that happens in U.S. history. SPARC is still active and encourages a space for Chicana community collaboration in cultural and artistic campaigns.
Gilbert Luján, Carlos Almaráz, along with Frank Romero and Robert de La Rocha, or "Beto de la Rocha" were the original members who came up with Los Four as their group name as a way to demonstrate the duality of being Chicano and their Chicano culture. [5] In the 1970s, Los Four became a part of the Chicano movement showcasing their murals with political themes tied to them. Muralist Judithe Hernández joined the all-male art collective in 1974 as its fifth member. This was crucial at the time as they were trying to be inclusive and steer away gender roles they grew up knowing [6] The group decided not to change the name of Los Four despite having five members because they had already gained popularity through the name Los Four. The collective was active in the 1970s through early 1980s. [3]
Murals were the preferred medium of street art used by Chicana artists during the Chicano Movement. [3] Murals became largely popular during El Movimiento in the 1970s as they were intended to bring people together. Judy Baca was the first Chicana to create a mural, Mi Abuelita, [8] she led the large-scale project for SPARC, The Great Wall of Los Angeles. It took five summers to complete the 700 meter long mural. The mural was completed by Baca, Judithe Hernández, Olga Muñiz, Isabel Castro, Yreina Cervántez, and Patssi Valdez in addition to over 400 more artists and community youth. During the creation of The Great Wall of Los Angeles Baca started putting women in leadership roles and trying to get them to become involved in the making of the mural. [9] Located in Tujunga Flood Control Channel in the Valley Glen area of the San Fernando Valley, the mural depicts California’s erased history of marginalized people of color and minorities. [3]
In 1989, Yreina Cervántez along with assistants Claudia Escobedes, Erick Montenegro, Vladimir Morales, and Sonia Ramos began the mural La Ofrenda, located in downtown Los Angeles. The mural, a tribute to Latina and Latino farm workers, features Dolores Huerta at the center with two women arched the history of Los Angeles and met with historians as she originally planned out the mural. The mural was halted after Carrasco refused alterations demanded from City Hall due to her depictions of formerly enslaved entrepreneur and philanthropist Biddy Mason, the internment of Japanese American citizens during World War II, and the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. [10]
Chicana entertainers have utilized the deconstructive qualities of performance art to challenge thought of character, identity, embodiment, and culture. Starting in the 1970s, Chicana artists began experimenting with street based performances that highlighted their unique role as cultural outsiders to white middle-class norms. Patssi Valdez was a member of the performance group Asco from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. Asco's art spoke about the problems that arise from Chican@s unique experience residing at the intersection of racial, gender, and sexual oppression. [3] Contemporary Chicana performance artists include Xandra Ibarra, Nao Bustamente, and Monica Palacios.
The Panza Monologues is a performance art piece built around the narratives of Chicana women. The Panza Monologues were composed by Virginia Grise and Irma Mayorga and presented as a solo performance by Grise herself. This performance art piece strikingly puts the panza ('belly') in the spotlight as an image that uncovers bits of their insight, viewpoints, lives, loves, misuses, and individual battles. [11] The piece was intended to spotlight something that most times women are made to feel like should be hidden, making it seem shameful, and as a reminder that body images can greatly influence a woman's life. [12]
Xandra Ibarra is Chicana performance artist who coined the term spictacles as a way to describe her performances of Mexican iconography that reveal the ways they function as racist tropes within performance cultures. [13] [14]
Laura Aguilar, known for her "compassionate photography," which often involved using herself as the subject of her work but also individuals who lacked representation in the mainstream: Chicanas, the LBGTQ community, and women of different body types. During the 1990s, Aguilar photographed the patrons of an Eastside Los Angeles lesbian bar. Aguilar utilized her body in the desert as the subject of her photographs wherein she manipulated it to look sculpted from the landscape. In 1990, Aguilar created Three Eagles Flying, a three-panel photograph featuring herself half nude in the center panel with the flag of Mexico and the United States of opposite sides as her body is tied up by the rope and her face covered. The triptych represents the imprisonment felt by the two cultures she belongs to. [15] Laura Aguilar created a collection of work that accepts the human figure as its focal request. The best of her art is from her initial work, known as the Latina Lesbian Series, which started in 1987. The series comprises highly contrasting pictures of ladies who identified as Latina and lesbian. Photographs in this series frequently went with the woman's signature as well.
Delilah Montoya, a Chicana photographic artist, has an assortment of work that explores her interpretation of being a woman and understanding the world she had been placed in by incorporating the idea of mestizo, the combining of cultures. Montoya became politicized after her residency in South Omaha after the exposure of a multitudinous amount of cultures. Montoya made pieces deliberately to highlight the presence of the absent often inspired through the early years of the Chicano Movement. [16] Further influences of the Civil Rights Movement allowed her to implore the idea of the reinvention of the self in terms of culture and history that encapsulates you.
Though the Chicano movement has passed, Chicanas continue to use art as a way to uplift their perspectives and celebrate Chicana voices. Young Chicana artists like Diana Yesenia Alvarado, who works with sculpture, create art that represent their culture and get little recognition. [17] New art forms have risen as technology has begun to play a more vital role in daily life as artists like Guadalupe Rosales use platforms like Instagram as a part of their work. [18] Rosales uses her role as an artist and an archivist to artfully collect photos and magazines of Chicanas from the 1990s. She portrayed her own understanding of growing up Chicana in East Los Angeles, a predominantly Latino area. On her account Veteranas y Rucas, her photos depict men in baggy pants and women with teased hair making their way through a time of anti-immigrant sentiments and gang violence. What started as a way for Rosales' family to connect over their shared culture through posting images of Chican@s history and nostalgia soon grew to an archive dedicated to not only 1990s Chican@ youth culture but also as far back as the 1940s. [19] Additionally, Rosales has created art installations to display the archive away from its original digital format and exhibited solo shows Echoes of a Collective Memory and Legends Never Die, A Collective Memory. [20] Rosales is the recipient of a 2019 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship. [21] She was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's first Instagram artist in residence in 2017. [22] Others like poet Felicia "Fe" Montes have gained popularity for their work in Chicana art for still other forms. Montes uses spoken word and slam traditions among other mediums to relate with her Latina following about identity. [23] She reads her poetry in unconventional places and questions women's historically subservient and lower-serving roles than men. As she writes, she keeps the Chicano culture in Los Angeles in mind, through women's collectives like Mujeres de Maiz.
Over the years, la Virgen de Guadalupe has been used by Chicana artists to explore themes of repression and feminine strength. [24] She has become a symbol through which artists have attempted to eradicate the stigmas facing women's place in society and ownership of their bodies. Alma López, Margarita "Mita" Cuaron, Yolanda López and Ester Hernandez are four Chicana feminist artists who used reinterpretations of La Virgen de Guadalupe to empower Chicanas. La Virgen as a symbol of the challenges Chicanas face as a result of the unique oppression they experience religiously, culturally, and through their gender. [25]
Alma López focuses on eradicating the stigmas surrounding women. She painted Our Lady in 1999, which portrays a modern Virgen de Guadalupe unclothed, supported by an unclothed "angel" with the wings of a monarch. [26] La Virgen wears nothing but flowers, but stands powerfully with her hands at her hips and her face expressing confidence and seriousness. She has reimagined the traditional icon to explore the shamelessness she believes should stem from a woman of today who does not conform to the expectation of society. Especially since La Virgen is typically clothed from head to toe, this piece of art challenges the themes the original pushes forward, including modesty and subservience. She expresses the need for ownership of the indigenous body. [27] Alma López also painted Lupe and Sirena in Love in 1999, which depicts the traditional Virgen de Guadalupe, nicknamed Lupe, lovingly embracing a mermaid. [28] This is Alma López's commentary on Catholic Church teaching regarding sexuality and gender. She portrays a sacred individual romantically embracing another woman, directly challenging commonly followed beliefs that ostracize LGBTQ individuals. Alma López pushes the boundaries that confine the common woman, depicting La Virgen de Guadalupe in modern and controversial light as she paints. "Our Lady of Controversy: Alma Lopez's 'Irreverent Apparition'" (2011) demonstrates some of the angry responses she has received for her work. Irreverent Apparition is mixed media and is a sacrilegious depiction of La Virgen.
Margarita “Mita” Cuaron’s most famous pieces of Our Lady of Guadalupe are Virgen de la Sandía (1996) and Virgen de Guadalupe Baby (1992). Virgen de Guadalupe Baby (1992) depicts La Virgen de Guadalupe as a baby surrounded by the womb, which is shaped by white, fluffy clouds and is surrounded by La Virgen’s typical yellow, sunlight rays and dark green garments. [29] Within the child's clasped hands is a light red heart. Portraying both ideas of birth and regrowth, Cuaron focuses on a theme of new possibilities and formations. [29] Cuaron’s painting, Virgen deGuadalupe Baby (1992) was recreated again in 2004 through a different kind of artistic medium, as a screen print. “In Nacimiento (2004) Cuaron depicts her first and only child swaddled in the protection of La Virgen's green mantle. She identifies the birth of her child and entry into motherhood as one of the most important moments in her life, extending gratitude to not only her child but birthers of new life everywhere.” [30] Similarly, this print has similar color and design features to her original piece, Virgen de Guadalupe Baby (1992). In Cuaron's screen print, Virgen de la Sandía (1996), La Virgen de Guadalupe is depicted as a nude woman standing on a crescent–shaped moon at the center of the art piece. [31] The disrobed religious figure is surrounded by a watermelon with red, orange, yellow, and white glow. [31] Scholar, Teresa Eckmann's analysis of Cuaron's screen print, Virgen de la Sandía (1996), makes a reference to the “sexual metaphor of the sandia, or watermelon, as an image of women's genitalia.” [32] Furthermore, this screen print was recreated in 1997, by using an alternative medium of watercolor paint. This new version of the piece, Virgen de laSandía (1997) depicts La Virgen de Guadalupe fully clothed in a pink gown covered by her recognizable green mantle with golden sun rays. [33] She is standing on a red crescent–shaped watermelon slice, instead of a crescent moon in the original piece of 1996. [34]
Like Alma Lopez, Yolanda López also focuses on themes of sexuality and the stigmas of women when she portrays La Virgen de Guadalupe. In her piece, "Love Goddess" from 1978, López merges the image of La Virgen with an image of Sandro Bottecelli's "The Birth of Venus" from the mid-1480s. [35] She makes the commentary that Christian nature rejects the natural appearance of women's bodies by embracing the fact that at an even earlier age, the Greek mythology would embrace it without the shame and fear that has developed. [27] López challenges the virginal image by eradicating the stigma and sin that are often associated; she infuses a sacred religious image with sexuality so as to celebrate it rather than be ashamed.
Ester Hernández references the sacred Virgen de Guadalupe in her painting, La Ofrenda (1988). [36] The painting recognizes lesbian love and challenges the traditional role of la familia. It defies the reverence and holiness of La Virgen by being depicted as a tattoo on a lesbian's back. She also painted La Virgen de Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de Los Xicanos (1975). [37]
The Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History (PRS) [38] was founded by Sandra de la Loza, the only known member in the organization, in 2001. The Pocho Research Society of Erased and Invisible History had a goal of uncovering hidden or otherwise distorted aspects of history in Chicano history and celebrate the forgotten figures of the Chicano movement. Utilizing the word pocho as a means to take back the term used by Mexican to demean Chicanos and Chicanas. [39] Chicano artists have used their art to educationally reaffirm historical events in their communities that have been rewritten in time. [40]
Chicano or Chicana is an ethnic identity for Mexican Americans who reject any colonial ancestral roots to embrace solely their Mexican Native ancestry. Chicano was originally a classist and racist slur used toward low-income Mexicans that was reclaimed in the 1940s among youth who belonged to the Pachuco and Pachuca subculture.
The Great Wall of Los Angeles is a 1978 mural designed by Judith Baca and executed with the help of over 400 community youth and artists coordinated by the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). The mural, on the concrete sides of the Tujunga Wash in the San Fernando Valley was Baca's first mural and SPARC's first public art project. Under the official title of The History of California, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017.
The Chicano Movement, also referred to as El Movimiento, was a social and political movement in the United States that worked to embrace a Chicano/a identity and worldview that combated structural racism, encouraged cultural revitalization, and achieved community empowerment by rejecting assimilation. Chicanos also expressed solidarity and defined their culture through the development of Chicano art during El Movimiento, and stood firm in preserving their religion.
Chicana feminism is a sociopolitical movement, theory, and praxis that scrutinizes the historical, cultural, spiritual, educational, and economic intersections impacting Chicanas and the Chicana/o community in the United States. Chicana feminism empowers women to challenge institutionalized social norms and regards anyone a feminist who fights for the end of women's oppression in the community.
Yolanda Margarita López was an American painter, printmaker, educator, and film producer. She was known for her Chicana feminist works focusing on the experiences of Mexican-American women, often challenging the ethnic stereotypes associated with them. Lopez was recognized for her series of paintings which re-imagined the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Her work is held in several public collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Ester Hernández is a California Bay Area Chicana visual artist recognized for her prints and pastels focusing on farm worker rights, cultural, political, and Chicana feminist issues. Hernández' was an activist in the Chicano Arts Movement in the 1960's and also made art pieces that focus on issues of social justice, civil rights, women's rights, and the Farm Worker Movement.
Judith Francisca Baca is an American artist, activist, and professor of Chicano studies, world arts, and cultures based at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, California. Baca is the director of the mural project that created the Great Wall of Los Angeles, which was the largest known communal mural project in the world as of 2018.
Alma López is a Mexican-born Queer Chicana artist. Her art often portrays historical and cultural Mexican figures, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Llorona, filtered through a radical Chicana feminist lesbian lens. Her art work is meant to empower women and indigenous Mexicans by the reappropriation of symbols of Mexica history when women played a more prominent role. The medium of digital art allows her to mix different elements from Catholicism and juxtapose it to indigenous art, women, and issues such as rape, gender violence, sexual marginalization and racism. This juxtaposition allows her to explore the representation of women and indigenous Mexicans and their histories that have been lost or fragmented since colonization. Her work is often seen as controversial. Currently, she is a lecturer at the University of California Los Angeles in the Department of Chicana/o Studies.
Judithe Hernández is an American artist and educator, she is known as a muralist, pastel artist, and painter. She is a pioneer of the Chicano art movement and a former member of the art collective Los Four. She is based in Los Angeles, California and previously lived in Chicago.
Chicana literature is a form of literature that has emerged from the Chicana Feminist movement. It aims to redefine Chicana archetypes, in an effort to provide positive models for Chicanas. Chicana writers redefine their relationships with what Gloria Anzaldúa has called "Las Tres Madres" of Mexican culture, by depicting them as feminist sources of strength and compassion.
The Chicano Art Movement represents groundbreaking movements by Mexican-American artists to establish a unique artistic identity in the United States. Much of the art and the artists creating Chicano Art were heavily influenced by Chicano Movement which began in the 1960s.
Francisca Flores was a labor rights activist, an early Chicana feminist, a journal editor, and an anti-poverty activist.
Alicia Escalante is a Chicana activist who was active during the Chicano Movement. She was the founder and chair of the East Los Angeles Chicana Welfare Rights Organization from 1967 to 1978.
Josefina Quezada was a Mexican-born Chicana muralist, photographer and supporter of the arts in Los Angeles. There are twelve murals in Los Angeles created by Quezada.
Yreina Cervantez is an American artist and Chicana activist who is known for her multimedia painting, murals, and printmaking. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Mexican Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
Barbara Carrasco is a Chicana artist, activist, painter and muralist. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work critiques dominant cultural stereotypes involving socioeconomics, race, gender and sexuality, and she is considered to be a radical feminist. Her art has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work was exhibited in the 1990-1993 traveling exhibition Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation.
Hijas de Cuauhtémoc was a student Chicana feminist newspaper founded in 1971 by Anna Nieto-Gómez and Adelaida Castillo while both were students at California State University, Long Beach.
Margarita “Mita” Cuaron is a Chicana curator, visual artist, social activist, educator, and a registered nurse. Born and raised in East Los Angeles, Cuaron utilizes a range of mediums in her artworks such as screen printing, printmaking, watercolor, mixed media, paper mache and more. Margarita “Mita” Cuaron was an active participant in the Chicano Movement and in the 1968 “blowouts” in East Los Angeles schools of the L.A. Unified School District.
Graciela Carrillo is a Chicana artist and muralist in San Francisco and member of the all-female Chicana/Latina artist group Mujeres Muralistas. She is a co-founder of Galería de la Raza, a gallery utilized to showcase the everyday lives of the Chicano community through art during the Chicano Civil Rights movement through the Chicano muralist movement.
The Queer Chicano art scene emerged from Los Angeles during the late 1960s and early 1990s composing of queer Mexican American artists. The scene’s activity included motives and themes relating to political activism, social justice, and identity. The movement was influenced by the respective movements of gay liberation, Chicano civil rights, and women’s liberation. The social and political conditions impacting Chicano communities as well as queer people, including the HIV/AIDS epidemic, are conveyed in the scene’s expressive work.