In this groundbreaking overview of Yolanda M. López’s life and career, Karen Mary Davalos traces the artist’s participation in Bay Area activism in the late 1960s and her subsequent training in conceptual practices. Davalos explores how López’s experiences informed her art, which ranges from posters to portraiture and the highly influential Guadalupe Series to later installations. López has consistently challenged predominant modes of Latino and Latina representation, proposing new models of gender, racial, and cultural identity.

 

Yolanda M. López reveals the complexity of the artist’s work over time and illuminates the importance of her contributions to Chicana/o art, Chicana feminism, conceptual art, and the politics of representation.

 

"Karen Mary Davalos provides a model case study for examining Chicana involvement in the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, showing how the visual arts played a role within those movements, and for thinking about what came after. Davalos makes a forceful and convincing argument that López is best understood as a conceptual artist—moving her and this canonical work from a rather simple representational relationship with Chicano/Chicana civil rights to a more complex understanding of how images work within political struggles."

 

To learn more about the A Ver: Revisioning Art History project, click here.