The life and work of a celebrated multimedia artist, cultural and feminist theorist, and community organizer
Amalia Mesa-Bains has garnered international recognition for multimedia installations that evoke the Chicana experience. This lively book recounts pivotal moments from her life, career, and collaborations, examining the intertwined worlds of Latinx culture, social movements, and contemporary art.Esteemed cultural historian Tomás Ybarra-Frausto relates Mesa-Bains's life to contemporary events and her artistic and intellectual production to her concept of domesticana (a feminist interpretation of rasquachismo) and her mestiza identity. He demonstrates how the Chicano Movement attuned the artist to her Mexican heritage, sparking her interest in the traditional home altars that became the aesthetic and cultural inspiration for her installation art.
Employing detailed descriptions and analyses of key works, this book is an art historical biography-memoire, offering a uniquely personal understanding of Mesa-Bains's prolific artistic practice and situating her life and art in the cultural and political milieu of the United States since the 1960s.
Distributed for UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press.
Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue celebrates ten years of Ginger Dunnill's podcast of the same name and exalts the intersectionality of contemporary artists. Intersectionality studies the overlapping and intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, and discrimination. Here are twenty-three extraordinary artists bringing the creativity of their processes and identities to life in the Albuquerque Museum's exhibition and in this accompanying book. Broken Boxes delves deeply into the realm of intentionality, challenging not just how artists create, but why. And Broken Boxes--the podcast, the exhibition, and the book--thrives on bringing artists together in dialogue with each other through the artist's own words. This book provides an opportunity to introduce the larger public to artists committed to creating, sustaining, and encouraging solidarity. By opening up the conversations across communities, groups, art practices, materials, and shared space, we hope to demonstrate how artists are forging new forms of action.
Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue celebrates ten years of Ginger Dunnill's podcast of the same name and exalts the intersectionality of contemporary artists. Intersectionality studies the overlapping and intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, and discrimination. Here are twenty-three extraordinary artists bringing the creativity of their processes and identities to life in the Albuquerque Museum's exhibition and in this accompanying book. Broken Boxes delves deeply into the realm of intentionality, challenging not just how artists create, but why. And Broken Boxes--the podcast, the exhibition, and the book--thrives on bringing artists together in dialogue with each other through the artist's own words. This book provides an opportunity to introduce the larger public to artists committed to creating, sustaining, and encouraging solidarity. By opening up the conversations across communities, groups, art practices, materials, and shared space, we hope to demonstrate how artists are forging new forms of action.
The life and work of a celebrated multimedia artist, cultural and feminist theorist, and community organizer
Amalia Mesa-Bains has garnered international recognition for multimedia installations that evoke the Chicana experience. This lively book recounts pivotal moments from her life, career, and collaborations, examining the intertwined worlds of Latinx culture, social movements, and contemporary art.Esteemed cultural historian Tomás Ybarra-Frausto relates Mesa-Bains's life to contemporary events and her artistic and intellectual production to her concept of domesticana (a feminist interpretation of rasquachismo) and her mestiza identity. He demonstrates how the Chicano Movement attuned the artist to her Mexican heritage, sparking her interest in the traditional home altars that became the aesthetic and cultural inspiration for her installation art.
Employing detailed descriptions and analyses of key works, this book is an art historical biography-memoire, offering a uniquely personal understanding of Mesa-Bains's prolific artistic practice and situating her life and art in the cultural and political milieu of the United States since the 1960s.
Distributed for UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press.
Through his work across many media, Houston and Los Angeles-based artist Vincent Valdez bears witness to the world around him, chronicling an America at the margins. Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream... features work from over twenty years and writings addressing Valdez's work through the lens of politics, history and humanity. Valdez's approach to imaging his country, its people, politics, pride, and foibles includes boxing, lynchings of Mexican Americans, border walls, politics, greed, the Ku Klux Klan, and the failings and triumphs of American society. Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream... accompanies survey exhibitions of his work by the same name at the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston (CAMH) in 2024-5 and MASS MoCA in 2025-6. The bilingual (English/Spanish) publication features both full-color works and a gatefold for The Strangest Fruit as well as a sewn-in booklet of behind-the-scenes studio images. Texts include a reprint of Joyce Carol Oates' On Boxing, essays by exhibition co-curators Denise Markonish and Patricia Restrepo; and a text by Evan Garza on the artist's relationship to Texas.
As the lead singer of the Grammy Award-winning rock band Quetzal and a scholar of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies, Martha Gonzalez is uniquely positioned to articulate the ways in which creative expression can serve the dual roles of political commentary and community building. Drawing on postcolonial, Chicana, black feminist, and performance theories, Chican@ Artivistas explores the visual, musical, and performance art produced in East Los Angeles since the inception of NAFTA and the subsequent anti-immigration rhetoric of the 1990s.
Showcasing the social impact made by key artist-activists on their communities and on the mainstream art world and music industry, Gonzalez charts the evolution of a now-canonical body of work that took its inspiration from the Zapatista movement, particularly its masked indigenous participants, and that responded to efforts to impose systems of labor exploitation and social subjugation. Incorporating Gonzalez's memories of the Mexican nationalist music of her childhood and her band's journey to Chiapas, the book captures the mobilizing music, poetry, dance, and art that emerged in pre-gentrification corners of downtown Los Angeles and that went on to inspire flourishing networks of bold, innovative artivistas.
An oral history of the Latin American artists who moved to New York in the late 1960s and pioneered a new conceptualism informed by their migrant experiences
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, during a time of global cultural and social upheaval, a key group of Latin American artists migrated to New York. Part of the generational shift toward Happenings, Minimalism and Conceptualism, the group worked in conversation with experimental practices while exploring topics of migration, identity, politics, exile, and nostalgia. Drawing from both American culture and the cultures of their countries of origin, their works reflect the unique perspectives--both as insiders and outsiders--that these artists had as newcomers.
Conceived as a visual reader with newly sourced and existing testimonies, This Must Be the Place is the first book of its kind to highlight this generation of artists in interviews and primary source material. Organized by themes and illustrated with artworks, photographs and other archival material, the testimonies of these artists offer the reader a dynamic, candid and historically rich memoir of 1960s and 1970s New York.
Joaquin Sorolla (born in Valencia 1863-died in Cercedilla 1923) is one of the most successful Spanish painters ever. He was a genius in capturing the essence of the scene he was painting. He lived while photography was being invented and popularized. Some of his breathtaking landscapes show how he was familiar with and employed similar techniques at the photograph. His landscapes are a great introduction to Spanish history.
In the course of preparing for his grand masterpiece The Vision of Spain, which hangs in the Hispanic Society of America, Sorolla visited many places of Spain. Here he painted types of people and local dress which made up his vision of Spain, diverse and colorful yet united.
Joaquin Sorolla also painted landscapes. Some of the landscapes are recordings like photographs. Others are exercises and development of his talent and technique. It is possible to follow his development as a master of impressionist painting by comparing landscapes by the year of completion. Sorolla only became better with age and maturity. We travel with Sorolla generally from North to South.
Enjoy this splendid tour of Spain!