A very human take on icon’s ideals
ARTIST YOLANDA LÓPEZ GETS A BELATED SOLO MUSEUM EXHIBIT
YOLANDA López didn’t live to see her first solo museum exhibition. The artist, who was born and raised in San Diego and later relocated to the Bay Area, died in early September at the age of 79. Her solo show, “Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist,” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego six weeks later.
This is bittersweet. For “Portrait of the Artist,” which was organized by MCASD curator Jill Dawsey, is a stirring tribute to the artist’s matrilineal lineage, an astute deconstruction of colonial and religious iconography, and an artist’s reclamation of agency over her own body. And it’s indicative of the narratives that institutions have, for so long, overlooked. As Dawsey told New York Times contributor Jori Finkel upon López’s death: “All of the work in our show was borrowed directly from the artist, not galleries or museums, and that tells you something.”
The show is small — occupying one of the galleries in MCASD’s downtown branch — and is focused primarily on two bodies of work from the 1970s.
The first is her “Guadalupe” series, in which the artist takes on one of Mexico’s most venerated cultural figures and gives her a feminist tweak.
In a trio of large-scale paintings, López depicted her grandmother Victoria Franco sitting on the Virgin’s starred mantle, her mother Margaret Stewart sewing it, and the artist herself clutching it as she jogs — as if it were a runner’s thermal blanket or a superhero cape.
The Virgin of Guadalupe couldn’t be a more complex icon to tackle. She was a tool of Catholic colonial proselytizing, intended to help convert the Indigenous masses to Christianity. Frequently rendered in painting with brown skin, her creation myth involves an apparition in 1531 to an Indigenous man named Juan Diego (original name: Cuauhtlatoatzin).
But the Virgin is also a syncretic figure, one who embodies Indigenous belief in female Aztec deities variously known as Tonantzin or Coatlicue.
She is also indicative of the impossible gender standards to which women in Catholic society are expected to aspire: virginal, pure, maternal.
It was daring for López to reimagine this figure — turning a myth into womanly flesh. And it was not without controversy. The artist received death threats; strangers vandalized her work.
I was particularly moved by the myriad small-scale studies the artist created as part of the project, showing the Virgin reimagined as Aztec deities, everyday women and even Botticelli’s Venus.
Also on view at MCASD are paintings the artist made when she was a student at UC San Diego.
Part of a series called “A Dónde Vas, Chicana? Getting Through College” — more informally known as the “Runner” series — they show her running around campus, putting a Chicana female figure against the angular geometries of the university’s Modernist buildings.
The figure she cuts is strong, joyful, athletic. Her legs are muscular, her gaze determined. This is no passive muse. López has power. So much that it took the art world decades to catch up to her.