Informative article about the exhibit when in San Diego. THE BUZZ: YOLANDA LÓPEZ – A PORTRAIT OF REBELLIOUS JOY

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego exhiit : https://www.mcasd.org/exhibitions/yolanda-lopez-portrait-artist

 

" She (Lopez) is one of the most important artists in the history of Chicana art and has long been a kind of a feminist hero of mine ever since I encountered her work in graduate school. When I went to meet her in May of 2019, I didn’t realize that she hadn’t had a proper museum show, so we began putting together a show focused on her work in the 1970s and ’80s. Almost all of the work in the exhibit was created during this period, and despite a mix of media (charcoal, collage, oil pastel, paint, photography, printmaking), they all share the common threads of political activism, feminism, and Chicanx culture." -Jill Dawsey, curator of MCASD,

 

BIOGRAPHY

Yolanda Margarita López was born and raised in Barrio Logan a historically Chicanx community in San Diego. She was a third-generation Chicana. Her grandparents migrated from Mexico to the United States, crossing the Río Bravo river in a boat while avoiding gunfire from the Texas Rangers.

After graduating from high school in Logan Heights in San Diego, she moved to San Francisco and took courses at the College of Marin and San Francisco State University.  She became involved in a student movement called the Third World Liberation Front, which shut down SFSU as a part of the Third World Liberation Front strikes of 1968. She also became active in the arts.

In 1969, López was instrumental in advertising the case of Los Siete de la Raza, in which seven young Latin American youths were accused of killing a police officer. Serving as the groups artistic director, she designed the poster "Free Los Siete," where the faces of these men are shown behind an inverted American flag that appears like prison bars.  This poster was featured in the exhibition "¡Printing the Revolution!" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where curator Evelyn Carmen Ramos noted it had been "circulated at rallies and in newspapers, and galvanized the Mission District's Chicano and Latino community into a powerful social force with a noticeable presence in subsequent city politics."

During the 1970s, López returned to San Diego, and enrolled at San Diego State University in 1971, graduating in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in painting and drawing. She then enrolled at the University of California, San Diego, receiving a Master of Fine Arts in 1979. While at the University of California, San Diego, her professors Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler encouraged her to focus on conceptual practice with social, political, and educational impact.

López is recognized for her iconic series that reinterpreted the Virgen de Guadalupe through drawings, prints, collage, and paintings. The series, which depicted Mexican women (among them her grandmother, her mother, and López herself) with the mandorla and other Guadalupean attributes, attracted attention for sanctifying average Mexican women shown performing domestic and other forms of labor. In her 1978 triptych of oil pastel drawings, López depicted herself clutching a snake while stepping on an angel, a symbol of the patriarchy.

López created another set of prints with a similar theme entitled Woman's Work is Never Done. One of the artworks for the set, The Nanny, addressed problems faced by immigrant women of Hispanic descent in the United States and was featured at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José.

Her famous political poster titled Who's the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim? features a man in an Aztec headdress and traditional jewelry holding a crumpled-up paper titled "Immigration Plans."  This 1978 poster was created during a period of political debate in the U.S. which resulted in the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1978 that limited immigration from a single country to 20,000 people per year with a total cap of 290,000.

López also curated exhibitions, including Cactus Hearts/Barbed Wire Dreams, which featured works of art concerning immigration to the United States. The exhibition debuted at the Galería de la Raza and subsequently toured nationwide as part of an exhibition called La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience.

López produced two films: Images of Mexicans in the Media and When you Think of Mexico, which challenged the way the mass media depicts Mexicans and other Latin Americans.

She later played an influential role in the San Francisco Bay Area, working as educational director for the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, and as an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, Mills College, and Stanford University for several decades