Yolanda López

Yolanda Margarita López (November 1, 1942 – September 3, 2021) was an American painter, printmaker, educator, and film producer. She was known for her Chicana feminist works focusing on the experiences of Mexican-American women, often challenging the ethnic stereotypes associated with them. Lopez was recognized for her series of paintings which re-imagined the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Her work is held in several public collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Early life and education Yolanda Margarita López was born on November 1, 1942, in San Diego, California, to Margaret Franco and Mortimer López. López and her two younger siblings were raised by her mother and maternal grandparents in San Diego.

After graduating from high school in Logan Heights in San Diego, she moved to San Francisco and took courses at the College of Marin She also became active in the arts. 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.

Career 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. and traditional jewelry holding a crumpled-up paper titled "Immigration Plans." The layout recalls the Uncle Sam Wants You recruitment posters from World War I. 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, which limited immigration from a single country to 20,000 people per year with a total cap of 290,000. The poster suggests that the ancestors of white Americans were themselves unwelcome immigrants. This piece was featured in ¡Printing the Revolution! exhibition as well. By using the image of an indigenous person, and the word pilgrim she combined politics with a symbol of significance in Mexican culture. There are two versions of this image. The original 1978 version was in response to Jimmy Carters immigration plan, but there's a reprinted version from 1981 and 1994. The new reprints were used due to proposition 187 in California. This proposition requested the termination of education and healthcare to undocumented immigrants. https://americanart.si.edu/artist/yolanda-lopez-31731

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 served as Director of Education at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, and taught at University of California, Berkeley,

She was awarded a $50,000 fellowship from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation as part of their Latinx Artist Fellowship in 2021.

Artwork created by Lopez is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Ulrich Museum of Art, the De Young Museum, and the Oakland Museum of California. However, starting a controversy was not López's intention. In "American Women: Great lives from History", author Mary K. Trigg writes, "López's formal education and burgeoning feminism contributed to her growing interest in the politics of representation, resulting in work that progressively examined the social and cultural invisibility of women".

The Virgen de Guadalupe

The Artist as the Virgen of Guadalupe painting shows López herself running out of the picture frame, smiling with her running shoes as if competing in a race, wearing Mary's shawl as a cape, and jumping over the red, white, and blue angel, showing pride in her culture, and finally holding a snake to demonstrate the strength she holds. López explained this imagery, saying "he holds the Guadalupe cloak like a cape at the end of a race and jumps over the angel with red, white, and blue wings a symbol of the United States capitalism". Regarding her intended viewer, López stated "Over the years as I have created my art, I have tried to address an audience, a Chicano audience, specifically a California Chicano audience".

López's Nuestra Madre (1981–88, acrylic and oil paint on masonite), a portrait in the Virgin of Guadalupe series, shows a stone figure as the portrait of an ancient goddess. During the 16th-century, the Virgin of Guadalupe was seen as connected to the goddess Tonantzin, an ancient Aztec goddess the Mexican people worshiped in Tepeyac prior to the Spanish colonization of Mexico. Tonantzin was disguised so the Spaniards would retain her as a religious image acceptable to their imported religion of Roman Catholicism. López removed the disguise of the Virgin of Guadalupe, placed on Tonantzin by the colonizers. She sought to restore Mexican history and remind Chicano/as of their hidden past. In Lopez's revised image, the icon is seen as a protector and leader. Davalos explains, López's "intent was not to explore the Virgen de Guadalupe's divinity but to deconstruct the image 'to see how we present ourselves'. López's deconstruction of images of women such as the Virgen de Guadalupe was an effort to acknowledge the complex social and historical conditions that inform the experiences of Mexican and Mexican American women". The four by five feet canvas painted with acrylic and oil portrays a toned Lopez as the runner jogging intensely across a college campus in a tank top and shorts with her hair pulled back. She based this painting on her experience of running to get in shape and have control over her body. The piece touches on identity, assimilation, and cultural change; it consists of three-dimensional items including cactus cutouts and children's clothing attached to a large yellow backdrop with a zigzag border on the top and a barbed wire border on the bottom. The bottom text reads: "THINGS I NEVER TOLD MY SON ABOUT BEING A MEXICAN". The work's message ranges from embracing one's culture to addressing the oppression and discrimination faced in America, as the two borders depicted in the artwork are suggestive of the literal borders between the United States and Mexico. It can also be connected to López's "culture shock" experience after going to college, where she realized that she knew nothing about her own Mexican heritage or cultural history. In the artwork, a textured and three dimensional mixed media collage, children's clothes protrude from the warm yellow background wall, with barbed wire depicted from an aerial perspective. As Karen Mary Davalos, argues, "López intentionally selected these objects for their mundane or everyday quality so that she could support her argument about the ubiquitous nature of stereotypical images. The images of sleeping Mexicans, smiling señoritas, and dancing fruits and vegetables are made absurd through unexpected placement, juxtaposition, and repetition. Her work interrogates images of Mexicans and Chicanos, and it challenges not only the context in which fine art is displayed but also the assumptions about who should be invited into such elite spaces." A few years later, López moved into the apartment next door and maintained a professional relationship with Yañez. 2008 – A Declaration of Immigration, group exhibition, National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, Illinois 2008 – Women's Work is Never Done, solo exhibition, Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts (MCCLA), San Francisco, California 2011 – Mex/L.A.:Mexican Modernisms in Los Angeles, 1930–1985, Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California. 2017 – Here Now: Where We Stand, group exhibition, Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts (MCCLA), San Francisco, California 2017–18 – Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York. 2021 – Portrait of the Artist, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, California