Chicana Art : The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities

In Alma López's digital printLupe & Sirena in Love(1999), two icons-the Virgin of Guadalupe and the mermaid Sirena, who often appears on Mexican lottery cards-embrace one another, symbolically claiming a place for same-sex desire within Mexican religious and popular cultures. Ester Hernández's 1976 etchingLibertad/Libertydepicts a female artist chiselling 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. In her paintingCoyolxauhqui Seen in East Oakland(1993), Irene Perez re-imagines as whole the body of the Aztec warrior goddess dismembered in myth. These pieces are part of the dynamic body of work presented in this pioneering, lavishly illustrated study, the first book focused on contemporary Chicana art. Creating an invaluable archive, Laura E. Pérez examines the work of more than forty Chicana artists across a variety of media including painting, printmaking, sculpture, performance, photography, film and video, comics, sound recordings, interactive cd-rom, altars and other installations forms, and fiction, poetry, and plays. All of the work discussed was produced after 1965, most after 1985. Providing a rich interpretive framework, Pérez describes how Chicana artists invoke a culturally hybrid spirituality to question and confront racism, bigotry, patriarchy, and homophobia. They make use of, and often radically rework, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican notions of art and art-making; ideas of Aztlan, the ancestral home of the Nahua people; Aztec mythology; Native American symbolism; and Catholic imagery of 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.