Monday, November 9, 2015: Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities

In 2008 artist Maya Gonzalez talked to U.C Berkeley Professor Laura E Perez about her 2007  book “Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities.” One of the only books of its kind dedicated to Chicana feminist artists, Perez looks at over 40 local and national artists who challenge biased notions of gender, sexuality and politics. For example, in the work of Alma Lopez, Perez looks at how Lopez symbolically claims a place for same-sex desire within Mexican and Chicano/a religious and popular cultures. And in Ester Hernandez’s 1976 etching Libertad/Liberty Hernandez depicts a female artist chiseling away at the Statue of Liberty, freeing from within it a regal Mayan woman and, in the process, creating a culturally composite Lady Liberty descended from indigenous and mixed bloodlines.

These Chicana artists make use of, and often radically rework, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican and other non-Western notions of art and art-making, and create liberating versions of traditional iconography such as the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Sacred Heart. Filled with representations of spirituality and allusions to non-Western visual and cultural traditions, the work of these Chicana artists is a vital contribution to a more inclusive canon of American arts. Providing a rich interpretive framework, Pérez describes how Chicana artists invoke a culturally hybrid spirituality that challenges racism, bigotry, patriarchy, and homophobia.

Click here to listen now. 59:50 min.

Events:
Rituals + Remembrance, Oakland Museum: now thru January 3,2016
Celebrating the theme of memorial across cultures, the  21st annual Días de los Muertos (Days of the Dead) exhibition, Rituals + Remembrance, explores how Latin American, Filipino, Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese and other communities view death, memory, and healing. The exhibition includes new and existing work by artists Nancy Hom, Lilli Lanier, Yvonne Escalante, Charles Valoroso, Bryan Keith Thomas, Safety First ©, Paco Garcia, Melanie Cervantes, and Jesus Barraza, as well as installations created by MetWest High School, Sankofa Academy, and the Alameda County Public Health Department.