Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Objects/Histories)

Creating an invaluable archive, Laura E. Pérez examines the work of more than forty Chicana artists across a variety of media including painting, printmaking, sculpture, performance, photography, film and video, comics, sound recording, interactive CD-ROM, altars and other installation forms, and fiction, poetry, and plays. While key works from the 1960s and 1970s are discussed, most of the pieces considered were produced between 1985 and 2001. Providing a rich interpretive framework, Pérez describes how Chicana artists invoke a culturally hybrid spirituality to challenge racism, bigotry, patriarchy, and homophobia. They make use of, and often radically rework, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican and other non-Western notions of art and art-making, and they struggle to create liberating versions of familiar iconography such as the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Sacred Heart. Filled with representations of spirituality and allusions to non-Western visual and cultural traditions, the work of these Chicana artists is a vital contribution to a more inclusive canon of American arts.

• Your Healing is Killing Me
• Chicana/o Remix: Art and Errata Since the Sixties
• Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (Feminist Constructions)
• Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell
• So Far from God: A Novel
• Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology
• Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza
• Chicano Folklore: A Guide to the Folktales, Traditions, Rituals and Religious Practices of Mexican Americans
• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
• Woman Hollering Creek: And Other Stories