Our México Solidarity Bulletin visual arts commentator, Victoria Hamlin, takes a look back at the career and contributions of one of the most influential Chicana artists of our time.
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Chicana artist Yolanda López used her art, over the course of six decades, to challenge demeaning stereotypes of Mexicanos and women. She died September 3, 2021.
I first absorbed the work of Yolanda López back in the sixties and seventies, but not until years later did I realize just how much the way she and other Chicana artists pushed social and cultural boundaries had affected me. Her Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe — an homage to the history and resilience of women of Mexican heritage — struck me as at once confusing, funny, and powerful.
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This work brings the traditional image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as pictured here at the immediate right, into the 20th century. Nothing sentimental or pious here. And what joy bursts forth!
In her Women Working series, López lifts working class women out of invisibility and portrays them as worthy of our attention and admiration.
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For one work in that series, López used as a stand-in for the Virgen an image of her mother working at a Naval Training Center sewing machine. López would later point out one of the problems with the ubiquity of the Virgen de Guadalupe. We have, she explained, “no real imagery of Latinas at the work that we do.”
López used her grandmother for another image.
“The Virgen de Guadalupe is always this beautiful, young thing,” she noted. “There is no depiction of her as an older woman. I was conscious about this and so that’s why I did my grandmother.”
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The work of Yolanda López contributed to my own quest to figure out how to be a woman of a new kind. Me — and so many more of us. Yolanda López, Presente!
The Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego will be showcasing an exhibition on the art of Yolanda López starting this October 16. The show will run through next April 24.
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