There are amazing altars that go up in Chicano Park, at the Sherman Heights Community Center, and many more places. Q: How do you and/or your family typically celebrate this holiday?Ī: I love to dress up and visit all of the beautiful altars and celebrations around the city. I found the process cathartic and began to build an altar every year for Brian. I attended the celebrations and gained a new love for the holiday, as it is a way to reconnect with your loved one. At the time, I was mourning the death of my first love, Brian, who died tragically in a canoe accident. Q: What kind of significance does the celebration of Dia de los Muertos hold for you, personally?Ī: In 2004, I lived Guanajuato, Mexico, for a year. Overall, though, I love the message through her work. I appreciate her diversity in working within many media, from painting and drawing to collage and photography. I love the marks, the drawing quality of the large, charcoal drawings of women, drawn larger than life and towering over the viewer. I love how absolutely herself she is in all of the work - she is a runner, a Latina raised in Barrio Logan. Q: What are some of your favorite pieces of hers?Ī: Well, its hard to choose because I love the narration of the photograph series of her self-portrait as Guadalupe. I also love the downtown area and my favorite new coffee shop, Pink Rose Cafe. What I love about La Mesa is the amazing amount of bird sounds. I have lived all over this county, from Oceanside to Carlsbad, Little Italy to Sherman Heights, and now La Mesa. Those implications being that all women are holy, that Latinas are holy, working women and aging women are all illuminated. So, when I saw her work, I thought of how brave it was, what she was doing, and how afraid she must have been to show the work based on the implications the paintings make. However, I was too afraid to really show the work of art for fear of backlash. Q: What was the first piece of hers that you recall seeing? What was your initial reaction to that piece, and why?Ī: My first reaction was, “Whoa.” I had made paintings similar to hers with a Guadalupe figure replaced by other figures. Her work, and that of others like Judy Baca and Laura Aguilar, have opened a new world to me, and my voice in the art world. As I navigated my world with a Caucasian mother and a Mexican father, as a Chicana artist living at the border, I began to see Chicano as its own culture. I was raised in Arizona during the time when Chicano studies were banned, and I hadn’t learned much of anything about my own culture. I had previously never had any formal education in Chicano art. Q: What kind of influence have Yolanda Lopez’s life and work had on you?Ī: When I first heard of Yolanda Lopez and her work, I had moved back to San Diego after my scholarship to graduate school at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in New York City. It was a fun experience that brought people together. It’s taken two months of all of these people making objects, and a few months of conversation and design before that. I wanted to use a lot of craft elements, like traditional papier-mâché, because I am interested in craft as fine art, and usually try to use materials that may be considered childlike or less valuable in society’s eyes, and then flip it on its head until you cannot deny its place in the fine art world. I knew I wanted to make a lot of orange pompoms that mimic the look of the marigolds, another important aspect of the ofrenda. I created giant, papier-mâché calaveras (skulls) and fruit, along with giant papel picado (a type of Mexican folk art created by cutting designs into paper) and images of Yolanda and her paintings, incense, water, and a paint palette and brushes, which were the artist’s favorite items. The pompoms are decorating the altar and its surrounding areas. Volunteers from the garden, Poway Girl Scout Troop 2011, and San Diego’s You Belong Here, created over 1,500 pompoms for this event. The garden volunteers built a wooden shelf structure, which tapers up to an arch with oil painted portraits I created of the late Yolanda Lopez, in her signature (Virgin of) Guadalupe poses. This altar has a round, 60-inch base that you can walk around, and it stands over 10 feet tall.
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