"as Chicana and other Latina/o art suggest, the cultural effects of increased globalization and cultural democracy include both the restructuring of religious beliefs and practices and the birth of hybrid forms." (96)
"Amalia Mesa-Bain's altar-installations are among the earliest and the most sustained explorations of the medium, spanning from 1975 through 1997, in more than thirteen major pieces." (97)Venus Envy Chapter I: "semiotic oscillation between altar and desk, to which are now added vanity table and laboratory....the vanity table also functions...as a theatrical space that allows for potentially expansive refashionings of identity. Like the religous altar it is a place for the care of the self, and for the accumulations of objects imbued with personal meaning. In this sense, it is an altar where reverence for theotherwise devalued, gendered self, and what if important to the self, is cultivated." (100-1)
"In [Carmen] Lomas Garza's case, popular culture-based altars, drawings, and retablo-inspired monito (ie. cartoon-like) paintings were neither naive nor natural choices for a trained artist in the 1970s. They were a conscious political choice for a young artist repeatedly exposed to discrimination against Mexican-Americans in South Texas. To combine teh visual languages of high and popular arts constituted a de facto critical reappraisal of both...." (104) [her website]
Santa Contreras Barraza "recreates the votive tradition, correctly, as a pre-Columbian legacy as much as a Christian one, by framing her exvotos through the use of Maya-like glyphs and the Mesoamerican visual conventions of the codex....it is clear the artis has restyled traditional Maya and Aztec glyphs innto new glyphs of her own.... [These works] express hybrid spiritualities thriough the culturally hybrid media of the retablo as a specifically religious art form.
Trinity (1993), for example, refigures the cross, the Virgin, and the Christian trinity in feminist and indigenlous terms, surrounded by symbols of rebirth and fertility in nature. Although the mestiza women appear in Western guise, as contemporary women, and as the Guadalupe, they are three in one, as the barely visible hands of an outstretched body behind them suggests." (109-10)Patricia Rodriguez
Patssi Valdez
Barbara Carrasco
Lourdes Portillo
1 min - Mar 8, 2006
"...Independent Television Service (ITVS) and Latino Public Broadcasting (LPB) Co-Presentation....Lourdes Portillo...Cara Mertes...Chris White..."
Frances Salome Espana
Rita Gonzalez
Christina Fernandez
Kathy Vargas
Delilah Montoya
Celia Herrera Rodriguez
"In Latin, the alter is literally 'the other.' ...The question of who or what the 'other' and alterity are depends on who is asking.... At the altar, conditions that appear in mutual opposition are mediated. Through altars and related forms, Chicana artists bring to visibility that which is disembodied for reasons of its alterity with respect to dominant cultural norms.... Through altar-based art, Chicana artists succeed in reminding us of a different approach to alterity, one that is in fact a perennial and cross-cultural concept, expressed in the Mayan as 'You are my other self,' In'Laketch." (143-5)
Christina Fernandez, Untitled (Man Tied Up), from Oppression series, 1989.
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Latina Pride Video
MUSIC: Lila Downs, "La Cumbia del Mole [English Version]" from La Cantina (2006), and "Simuna" from Global Transmissions (2000).
From her website: "I was born in a small pueblo in oaxaca, this is where my umbilical cord is buried, so according to tradition i will always return to this place. my mother is a mixtec indian from san miguel el grande and my father was a north american filmaker fromcolorado springs of scottish descent. I went to school in tlaxiaco and st paul minnesota , and to highschool in oaxaca city where I began studying voice at bellas artes and Rowland heights, california. I studied voice and anthropology at the university of minnesota and studied symbolism of the trique textiles woven by women from the trique nation in the mixtec region of oaxaca. I dropped out for a while and began writing songs about mixtec inmigrants who go to the u.s. to work in the fields and the kitchens. I met paul cohen around this time, and we started to write cumbias and other tunes together."
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FREEWRITE: what have you learned during this section of the course that matters the most to you?
Think of the syllabus as the table of contents to a book.
What is this book about?
What is the first section of the book about?
What is the second section of the book about?
What is this section of the book about?
Where are you today in the story of the class?
AN INTRODUCTION TO WOMEN, ART AND CULTURE
Getting Started by introducing our Books and Concerns
Prospective Immigrants: Introducing Ourselves as subjects in history
Women, Art, Culture: what counts as art?
Assumptions about Feminism & Art—ASS. #1 DUE
BUT IS IT ART? BILLBOARDS, MURALS AND SHADOWS RESHAPING POSSIBILITIES
Anyone can do it: activist imagination shapes how we define feminism
Processes of Transformation in communities
Billboard Utilization, Truth in Advertising, Subverts
Art Worlds, whose money, whose art?
Your group's event and definition of feminism—ASS. #2 DUE; presentations
ANALYSIS IN WOMEN'S STUDIES: EVERYDAY LIFE SEEN WITH NEW EYES
Your group's event and definition of feminism—presentations continued
Intersecting our various forms of movement, feminists and more
Intersectionalities and histories, the matrix of domination—ASS. #3a DUE
Is SF Art? Moving through Time and Making Worlds
Kindred and everyday life, who are we connected to and how?
Kindred and violence, what work does it do?
Spirit, Glyphs, and reading feminist scholarship
Passionate Politics, the personal, the political, the world
Is feminism fun? is funny fun? those Guerilla Girls
=>HERE NOW<=
Altar, Alter, spirit and feminism in the everyday
A feminist sexual politic, feminism is for every body
Your analysis of Everyday Life—Ass. #3b DUE
ARTS, COMMUNITIES, CULTURES, ACTIONS AND SPIRITS
Art and Direct Action, Fight Like a Girl
From Generation to Generation
Name ourselves as liberated free zones
Time to Rise and Shine
Heart, Self, Other
LAST CLASS—ASS. #4 DUE
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