Ofrenda (6): "transmutation of social or personal suffering into penetrating visions of the present and brave sightings of hopeful, better futures."
How this might look in other cultural traditions:
see Webbing: Art Museums/National Museum of African Art/Gawu/Artworks
A whole set of works based on transforming "huge piles of detritus from consumption."
Liquor labels and metal are transformed into kente cloth -- communicating philosophical, religious and political meanings -- in Versatility, conveying "the notion of adaptability and the twists and turns of human existence."
Pérez is teaching us how to see all this in a particular feminist art political tradition:
Chicana (12): "a term that artists identified with the ongoing, albeit shifting, shape of civil rights struggles have applied to themselves and their work, as artists decisively shaped in the United States, resistant to the racism against their Mexican and Native American cultures and the discrimination against a still largely pauperized, economically exploited, and culturally stereotyped and marginalized body of citizens."
post-1964 artwork (12): "I have focused on post-1965 artwork, especially that produced between 1985 and 2000, by women who identify themselves as Chicanas -- not as a synonum for Mexican American, Mexican, Latina, Hispanic, or Latin American, but rather in dialogue, if not complete identification with the concern for social justice of the Chicana/o, and other civil rights movements."
the first chapter summarized (15): "intellectual vindication of Indigenous epistemologies that characterized much of the thought and art of the Chicana/o movement, itself the heir in this respect to the great intellectual and artistic generations of the 1920s through the 1950s in Mexico." (For example, one major artist of this period of importance to feminists is Frida Kahlo.)
"feminist and queer idioms" traced in chapter one (15):
• glyphs --
some images from Google; Mayan writing; Wikipedia on Maya script
• codices
• the artist as tlamatinime --
Aztec philosophy; Indigenious or Ethnoepistemology and cognitive specialists
Why queer as well as feminist? Some of the artists Pérez discusses are lesbians, so that is one reason. Another lies in the various associations the word "queer" has politically: that is to say, calling into question the normative, the generic, the taken-for-granted dominant form, the unmarked. Queering these is an activity of creating other possibilities, meanings, and worlds.
writers and visual artists whose work is explored in chapter one of Laura Pérez, Chicana Art:
writers:
• Gloria Anzaldúa -- memorial web altar for Gloria Anzaldúa
• Cherríe Moraga -- her website
• Sandra Cisneros -- her website
• Ana Castillo -- her website
4 min - Jul 26, 2007 -
"...2412tv latin television fun hispanic profile cultura culture bilingual music show belen ana castillo latino latina..."
visual artists:
• Frances Salomé España -- picture with Laura Pérez in online faculty magazine
• Yreina D. Cervántez -- artwork online Danza Ocelotl
• Ester Hernandez -- her website
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MUSIC: "Espiral," from Espiral (2003) by Santa Sabina -- their website
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About This Video "Vacio"/"Emptyness"
Directed by LEONARDO BONDANI (MalditaVecindad, Caifanes, TijuanaNo, etc.).
Shot on locations of Zipolite Oaxaca, Mexico.
Santa Sabina is one of the most important cult-band from Mexico City, known for their dark & unusual tone. This is their first music video & their first album, produced by Alex Marcovich, at the time he was guitarrist of "Caifanes". Later the band got produced by Adrian Belew.
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