Alma Lopez

Alma López (born 1966) is a Mexican-born Queer Chicana artist. Her art often portrays historical and cultural Mexican figures, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Llorona, filtered through a radical Chicana feminist lesbian lens. Her art work is meant to empower women and indigenous Mexicans by the reappropriation of symbols of Mexica history when women played a more prominent role. The medium of digital art allows her to mix different elements from Catholicism and juxtapose it to indigenous art, women, and issues such as rape, gender violence, sexual marginalization and racism. This juxtaposition allows her to explore the representation of women and indigenous Mexicans and their histories that have been lost or fragmented since colonization. Her work is often seen as controversial.

Life and education She was born in Los Mochis, Sinaloa and is married to novelist and poet Alicia Gaspar de Alba.

Alma López's family moved from Los Mochis, Sinaloa, Mexico to Los Angeles when she was young. Alongside the image of the Virgin Mary much of the culture from both sides of the border influenced López in the development of her artwork. In her teaching, she emphasizes the importance of seeing and sharing different cultures and identities in art, especially for queer and Chicana/o communities. These ideas are also discussed extensively by scholars when they study her art. At UCLA, she launched the “Queer Arts Wikipedia Research Project,” an initiative in which students researched and wrote Wikipedia biographies of underrepresented queer and Chicana/o artists. Students in these classes created over 70 biographies, helping to document artists whose stories had been missing from Wikipedia and other public archives. López describes the project as “information activism,” designed to bring greater visibility to overlooked artists and broaden access to queer art history. She has also guided collaborative public art projects, including the 2014 Black Cat Tavern mural, which she created with students from her “Queer Art in LA” course.

Works

Our Lady Our Lady is a photo-based digital print that depicts Raquel Salinas, a performance artist, confidently staring back at the viewer, wearing a bikini of roses. In the image, below the mandala of the virgen there is a nude butterfly angel that depicts Raquel Gutierrez. The roses allude to the Virgin of Guadalupe's origin myth, though her posture and eye contact defies the traditional version of the Virgin. Her cloak is covered in images of Coyolxauhqui, the Aztec moon goddess. The juxtaposition of Catholicism iconography and indigenous goddess reference the suppression of indigenous female goddess by Catholicism and Our Lady is contemporary Chicanas re-appropriating both.

The women photographed for the piece was motivated to model for it to reclaim her body and heal after being raped. She practices an indigenous spirituality that considers La Virgen de Guadalupe to be Tonantzin, or mother earth.

Heaven 2 Mural Heaven 2 was a mural displayed outside Galería de la Raza from November 2000 to January 2001. It portrays a woman on her deathbed thinking of herself and her lover holding hands on the moon.

Lupe and Sirena in Love is a 1999 digital mixed media print depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Sirena, from the Loteria game, embracing each other. López has acknowledged the butterfly below the two figures in the composition to be both a Monarch butterfly and a Viceroy butterfly.

La Historia de Adentro/La Historia de Afuera Mural La Historia de Adentro/La Historia de Afuera was a mural painted by Yrenia Cervántez and Alma López on the Huntington Beach Art Center in 1995 as part of the center's inaugural exhibition. The mural used elements of water and waves as it showed the local history of people of color. Under the lead of Naida Osline and HBAC, the artists intended for the work to add visibility to the diversity of the community and their history. All of the models included in the work were local residents known for or related to someone affected by local historical events. López saw the story of Alicia Alvarado, La Medusa, who herself had been inspired by a tag team match of luchadoras to become a wrestler herself. López saw these women in a male dominated sport like lucha libre and wanted to display the lesser known presence of women. Something which she herself believed that young people should see and that is the inclusion of women throughout male dominated history and events.

UCLA mural In 2014 she and her students from her "Queer Art In LA" class at UCLA painted a mural in the LGBTQ studies offices. The mural shows the queer community and their allies protesting the police raids of the Black Cat Tavern.

Awards and honors

1998 City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Grant 1998 Brody Emerging Visual Artist Grant, California Community Foundation 1999 Premio Pollock-Siqueiros Binacional 2002 Arts Funding Initiative Visual Arts Mid Career Grant, California Community Foundation 2004 Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice Visual Artist Grant 2005 Outstanding Community Activist, Los Angeles LGBT Center 2005 Durfee Foundation's Artist Resource Completion Grant 2009 UC Regents' Lecturer, UCLA Department of Art History and the Cesar E. Chavez Department of Chicana/o Studies 2011 UCLA Diversity Program for Innovative Courses in Undergraduate Education, Cesar E. Chavez Department of Chicana/o Studies 2012 UCLA Diversity Program for Innovative Courses in Undergraduate Education, LGBT Studies Program 2013 UCLA Diversity Program Student's Choice LGBT Outstanding Faculty Award 2013 Richard T. Castro Distinguished Visiting Professorship, Metropolitan State University, Denver, Colorado 2018 Faculty Research Grant, UCLA Academic Senate's Council on Research