Yreina Cervantez

Yreina Cervantez (born 1952) is an American artist and Chicana activist who is known for her multimedia painting, murals, and printmaking. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Mexican Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. and raised in Mount Palomar, California. Cervantez's mother was creative and served as an artistic inspiration to her daughter. Her childhood was spent in culturally segregated, rural areas and exposure to the conservative attitude of these neighborhoods inspired Cervantez to later join the Chicana/o movement. Her work was also part of the CARA project and traveling exhibition which opened in 1983 and had its final venue in 1994. Cervantez was a cast member of the feminist film, Define, by O.Funmilayo Makarah. Between 1990 and 1993, she worked as a coordinator at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. She overlaps two different "worlds," one of the present and another of the past, creating a visual space where ideologies are explored and examined.

Growing up, Cervantez did not see many Latina images in popular culture and because of this, her portraits of Latina women and her self-portraits became an important part of her work. Cervantez's self-portraits show an artist that is at once whole and fragmented, experiencing nepantla. In many of her self-portraits, she continues to blend contemporary culture with Aztec and mesoamerican imagery. Her female figures are often described as "inspiring representations of female agency."

Cervantez has also created many large-scale murals in Los Angeles and is considered a pioneer of the Chicana mural movement. Cervantez has been a major influence on artist Favianna Rodriguez, who was so impressed with a printmaking class she took with Cervantez that she quit school to become a full-time artist.

In 2024, her work was included in the Xican-a.o.x. Body group exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida, which traveled from the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum, California.

La Ofrenda (1989) La Ofrenda (1989) is Cervantes’s most notable work and is often pointed to as an example of intersectionality in art. On the left side of the mural Cervantez paints an indigenous woman surrounded by iconography and examples of indigenous spirituality and religious practice. In the middle Dolores Huerta is centered as a well known Chicana woman accompanied again by iconography such as the United Farm Workers (UFW) insignia.Thus the mural portrays the dichotomy between indigeneity and femininity and what the two mean specifically through the lens of a Chicana woman. Since its creation it has been restored in 2012 by the Los Angeles based Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC).

Cervantez’s La Ofrenda tackles particular exclusionary praxis in activist movements in a myriad of ways. Most notably, in the mural Cervantez places the contemporaneous iconography of activism in juxtaposition with Latina, Chicana, and Indigenous women who are often excluded from the discourse of a social justice movement.