E3W Literature | University of Texas

Laura E. Pérez
Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities
Duke University Press, 2007
390 pages
$24.95

Reviewed by Marzia Milazzo

In her first book, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (2007), Laura E. Pérez explores the intersection of spiritual practices and oppositional politics in works created by more than forty Chicana artists between the mid-1980s and the year 2000. The book, which includes over eighty illustrations, represents a significant breakthrough in the systematic study of Chicana art. In fact, whereas Chicana literature has received wide critical attention over the years, Pérez can claim to have written the first book-length study dedicated exclusively to Chicana artwork. In Chicana Art Pérez examines hundreds of works encompassing a variety of media such as painting, photography, documentary, film, digital print, multimedia, altar installation, sculpture, interactive CD-ROM, drama, poetry, spoken word, and other performances.

Spirituality and Chicana art, the author suggests, share a history of critical neglect, for they have both been confined to the margins of intellectual discourse, or they have been ignored in the Western academic milieu altogether. The mere discussion of the “minefield” of spirituality within the realm of academia can be an unpleasant endeavor as spiritual practices appear to have no place in secular Eurocentric cultures and they are often dismissed in intellectual circles as folk beliefs, superstitions, or examples of primitivism. Pérez notices also that to discuss spirituality in relation to female artists is dangerous because this might seem to enforce sexist and racist narratives, which continue to associate the irrational and the spiritual with the female—especially with the woman of color—while rationality is claimed as a quintessentially male attribute. Yet in her critical approach Pérez makes clear that an analysis of Chicana art cannot, and should not, overlook the importance that spiritual practices and religious imageries hold for Chicana artworks and for the women that produced them. Although some of the Chicana artists discussed in the book are atheists, their work nonetheless engages the sacred and a culturally hybrid spirituality as compelling means of resistance and forms of dissent.
The notion of art and self-expression as means of empowerment is intimately related to the concept of creation as healing process. In fact, according to Pérez, in Chicana visual arts la cultura cura, culture cures, and artistic projects come to life through a process of creation, which can be cathartic and transformative. However, although for an artist the most spiritual aspect of an artwork can arguably be the creation itself, Pérez does not consider this process as part of her analysis. Since Pérez is mostly concerned with the critical interpretation of the final product, the reader learns little about how the artworks came into being, about the modus operandi of the Chicana artists, or about the circumstances that inspired the works.

The spirituality invoked by many of the artists represented in Chicana Art is nondogmatic, unorthodox, culturally hybrid, and often self-created. Apart from Catholicism and Amerindian traditions, Chicana artists synchretically incorporate elements of Santería, Judaism, Buddhism, or New Age spiritualities. Many Chicana works adopt and at the same time subvert hegemonic cultural traditions by merging Judeo-Christian elements with indigenous practices and re-interpreting them in an indigenist feminist light. It is not surprising that the Aztec and Maya pantheons once again provide Chicana artists with the majority of Amerindian imageries, symbologies, and terminologies adopted in their artistic productions. However, since the Chicana artist’s exposure to Mesoamerican indigenous practices can be the result of intellectual endeavor rather than lived experience, Pérez affirms that “the hybrid spiritualities evident in the work of some Chicana artists, paradoxically, are themselves appropriations.” Hence, the incorporation of Aztec and Mayan traditions in various Chicana works at times resemble a neo-Classical approach for the artist borrows images belonging to different indigenous traditions indiscriminately and without having any concrete connection with the cultures and the peoples that produced those images.

According to Pérez, indigenous symbols and traditions not only provide Chicana artists with original tools for their creativity, but also grant Chicana artists access to alternative epistemologies. Spiritual knowledge becomes a means of empowerment, which enables Chicanas to confront Eurocentric discourses, hegemonic patriarchal norms, and compulsory heterosexuality. The convergence of the spiritual and the political in Chicana art creates powerful intersections that frequently manage to shock, disturb, puzzle, or delight the observer. For instance, Alma Lopez’s Our Lady (1999), one of the works described and depicted in Chicana Art, encountered strident critics among the Catholic clergy and Chicano nationalists who called for its immediate removal from the New Mexico Museum of Folk Art. In the “scandalous” digital print, a barely dressed woman posing as Virgen de Guadalupe and a bare breasted female cherub do little more than stare impudently at the observer. Whereas the bodies of those two women are not eroticized, in another well-known digital print titled Lupe & Sirena in Love (1999), Alma Lopez represents a sensual and erotically charged embrace between the Virgin of Guadalupe and the mermaid Sirena. According to Pérez, through her work Alma Lopez symbolically claims “visibility for lesbian desire within national popular culture and religious cultures.”

As has become clear, spirituality in the context of Chicana art is not escapist or self-absorbed. Whereas many Chicana works are informed by a desire to recover a cultural past through memory and creative endeavor, the Chicana past is not usually perceived as a prelapsarian state, nor is Chicana art usually pervaded by corrosive nostalgia or a mournful aesthetic contemplation. Rather, the Chicana artworks represented in Pérez’s book are frequently socially committed, or shaped by what the artist Amalia Mesa-Bains defines as “politicizing spirituality.” Indeed, numerous works testify to their author’s concern for social justice. For instance, Yolanda M. López’s installation titled Women’s Work is Never Done (1994) and Alma López’s digital print California Fashion Slaves (1997) literally give a face to Latina immigrants who are forced to endure economic exploitation silently and subserviently. Artworks such as these have little to do with religion in a traditional sense and everything to do with a creative adaptation of spirituality for the purpose of social critique. There is much to be learned from the powerful, political, and spiritually nurturing works of these Chicana artists and other women of color across the Americas. Laura E. Pérez’s Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities represents a compelling contribution towards the intellectual engagement of Chicana art in North American universities and beyond. The road towards a greater valorization and inclusion of multicultural arts in academia and in mainstream venues will hopefully continue to be paved.