Hung Liu, Resident Alien, 1988, oil on canvas, 60 x 90 x 2 inches (San José Museum of Art) © 2025 Hung Liu Estate

Resident Alien is a painting that looks like paperwork. Though its large size and slightly uneven lettering announce the artwork’s handmade status, the official language, paperwork fields, and fingerprint register as a government document. Based on Hung Liu’s own resident alien card issued by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1984, the painting expresses a deeply personal experience awkwardly shaped and standardized by cookie-cutter bureaucracy that applies the same process to the varied and diverse lives of individuals.

Liu’s painting replicates the proportions of a green card. Dispassionate data fields for Name, DOB (Date of Birth), Alien Number, POE (Point of Entry), and Class in red identify, track, and label a living person as “Resident Alien.” Green card holders are typically eligible to apply for citizenship after a period of time. A three-quarter profile of Liu adheres more to Italian Renaissance portrait conventions than frontal ID photography. Reserved but noticeable brushwork creates tension between her handmade authorship and the institutional authority of a government ID card. In painting herself in a version of her own residency card, Liu wrests authorial control from INS that would identify her, number her, and track her. [1] “Resident Alien” is a self-portrait entangled in government bureaucracy.

Hung Liu with Resident Alien, Capp Street Project, 1988 (photo: © Ben Blackwell)

Life and education

Liu waited four years for a visa to the United States after she received admission to the University of California, San Diego in 1980. She finally immigrated in 1984. Born in 1948 in Changchung, China, Liu directly experienced much of China’s political turmoil in the 20th century. Liu’s father, an officer in the Nationalist Army, which lost the Chinese Civil War (1927–36; 1945–49), was imprisoned in a labor camp when Liu was only six months old; Liu’s mother was forced to divorce her father. Liu would not see him again until 1994. In 1968 in her early twenties preparing for medical school, the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) sent Liu and others labelled “intellectuals” to the countryside for “reeducation” on a military farm. [2]

While threshing rice, digging ditches, caring for horses, and fertilizing fields, Liu continued to sketch in secret and take photographs of the peasants she befriended with a borrowed camera. [3] In 1972 she was able to enroll at the Beijing’s Teachers College to study art, specifically art in service of the Party. Liu said of her education, “artists were expected to be tools of propaganda.” [4] In 1981 she graduated with a degree in mural painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, a prestigious art school that would later graduate artists with political and critical viewpoints.

Liu wanted to further her art education. It wasn’t easy. About getting her visa, Liu said, “At every level, they tried to stop me.” [5] Nevertheless, Liu along with artists including Ai Weiwei was part of the first generation of Chinese citizens to study abroad in the United States following the normalization of relations between the United States and China in 1979. At the University of California, San Diego she studied with Allan Kaprow, the performance artist who initiated ‘Happenings,’ alongside fellow students Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson. In the United States, Liu explored the hardships of peasants and immigrants, especially women. [6] Liu eventually settled in Oakland where she taught at Mills College from 1990 until her retirement in 2014. She died in 2021 at age 73.

Self-portrait of an Asian American artist

Liu painted Resident Alien four years after she arrived in the United States. While researching historical photographs of Chinese immigrants in 1988 during a residency at the Capp Street Project in San Francisco, she decided to include her own immigration experience. The resulting exhibition was also titled “Resident Alien”—a term Liu associated with Sigourney Weaver in the movie Alien. [7]

Hung Liu, Resident Alien, 1988, oil on canvas, 60 x 90 x 2 inches (San José Museum of Art) © 2025 Hung Liu Estate

Liu plays with the naming authority of government documents in Resident Alien. Viewers scanning details will notice that Liu put her date of birth, “DOB,” as 1984, the year she arrived in the United States and began what was, in many ways, a new life. A deliberate misspelling of immigration reading “Immignation” on the top of the green card implies the United States is a country of immigrants. In a san serif font, the Resident Alien permit identifies the card holder not as Hung Liu, but as “Cookie, Fortune.” The fortune cookie, often given gratis with the check at U.S. Chinese restaurants did not originate in China, but in California, most likely in San Francisco. “Fortune cookie” is also a pejorative racist slur objectifying Chinese women Liu heard and then turned into a symbol of existing between cultures.

Though immigrating to the United States gave Liu more liberty in her artistic career, it was not without its complications. The green card itself is evidence of the required documents, bureaucratic processes, and paperwork immigrants are obliged to undergo. [8] Liu returned to the idea of living between two cultures repeatedly throughout her oeuvre; “Resident Alien” in many ways foreshadows themes in Liu’s later work focusing on the Chinese immigrants who built railroads across the United States, picture brides, the so-called “Comfort Women” abused by the occupying Imperial Japanese Armed Forces during WWII.

Liu would continue to work with photographs, complicating their documentary qualities with the expressive possibilities of paint. In a series made shortly before her death in 2021 titled “After Lange” referring to Dorothea Lange, the photographer who documented and visualized the Dust Bowl, Liu painted migrants, many of them children, and their difficult labor conditions.

Both traditional and futuristic in look, Ortiz’s ceramic figures play a role in his retelling of the Pueblo Revolt.

Virgil Ortiz, Cochiti Pueblo, Aeronauts: Steu, 2014, clay, slip, and wild spinach paint, 58.2 x 18/8 x 19/7 cm and Aeronauts: Cuda, 2014, clay, slip, and wild spinach paint, 51.1 x 15.9 x 16.8 cm (The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond) © Virgil Ortiz. Speakers: Siera Hyte, Schiller Family Curator of Indigenous American Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Beth Harris, Smarthistory

Completely constructed in earthenware, these life-size figures suggest a transcendent power.

Anita Fields, Elements of Being, 1997, earthenware with terra sigillata slip, 182.9 x 152.4 cm (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville) © Anita Fields. Speakers: Dr. Ashley Holland, Curator & Director of Curatorial Initiatives, Art Bridges Foundation, and Dr. Beth Harris, Smarthistory

Judy Chicago’s landmark installation gives notable women from history a seat at the table.

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–79, ceramic, porcelain, textile, triangular table 14.63 x 14.63 m (Brooklyn Museum) © Judy Chicago. Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–79, ceramic, porcelain, and textile, 1463 x 1463 cm (Brooklyn Museum; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

A Place at the Table

The Dinner Party Research Team, Santa Monica, California (Through the Flower Archive) © Judy Chicago

The Dinner Party is a monument to women’s history and accomplishments. It is a massive triangular table—measuring 48 feet on each side—with 39 place settings dedicated to prominent women throughout history and an additional 999 names are inscribed on the table’s glazed porcelain brick base. This tribute to women, which includes individual place settings for such luminary figures as the Primordial Goddess, Ishtar, Hatshepsut, Theodora, Artemesia Gentileschi, Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Sanger, and Georgia O’Keeffe, is beautifully crafted. Each place setting has an exquisitely embroidered table runner that includes the name of the woman, utensils, a goblet, and a plate.

The Dinner Party was intended to be exhibited in a large, darkened, sanctuary-like room, with each place setting individually lit, making it look as though it is composed of thirty-nine altars. The 999 names, written in gold, gleam softly, suggesting a hallowed or liminal space. 5 years in the making (1974–79) and the product of the volunteer labor of more than 400 people, The Dinner Party is a testament to the power of feminist vision and artistic collaboration. It was also a testament to Chicago’s ability to create a work of art that spoke to people who had not previously been a part of the art world. When the exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco in March of 1979, it was mobbed. Judy Chicago’s accompanying lecture was completely sold out.

Empress Theodora’s place setting (detail), Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–79, ceramic, porcelain, and textile, 1463 x 1463 cm (Brooklyn Museum; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Although critics praised the table runners, they ignored or disparaged the plates. These ceramic objects, which become increasingly three-dimensional during the procession from prehistory to the present in order to represent women rising, look somewhat like flowers and butterflies. They also resemble female genitalia, which many people found disturbing. Writing for the feminist journal Frontiers in 1981, Lolette Kuby was so taken aback by the plates’ forms that she suggested that Playboy and Penthouse had done more to promote the beauty of female anatomy than The Dinner Party ever could.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s place setting (detail), Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–79, ceramic, porcelain, and textile, 1463 x 1463 cm (Brooklyn Museum; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Kuby’s distaste for pudenda was echoed more forcefully a decade later, when Chicago attempted to donate the artwork to the University of the District of Columbia. Chicago was forced to withdraw her donation after the U.S. Senate threatened to withhold funding from UDC if they accepted what Rep. Robert Dornan characterized as “3-D ceramic pornography” and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher dismissed as a “spectacle of weird art, weird feminist art at that.” It was not until 2007 that The Dinner Party, an icon of feminist art, would find a permanent home in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Feminist Education

What drove Chicago to embark on such a large and controversial feminist project? She was inspired, in part, by her pioneering work in feminist education. She started the Feminist Art Program at California State University, Fresno in 1970. The following year she founded the Feminist Art Program (FAP) at the newly established California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) with the abstract painter Miriam Schapiro. The galleries were still under construction when Chicago arrived at CalArts, so the FAP had their exhibition in an abandoned mansion that was slated to be demolished shortly after. The resulting installation, Womanhouse, was a testament to Chicago’s method of teaching, which begin with consciousness raising and then progressed to realizing a message through whatever medium was most suitable, whether it was performance, sculpture, or painting.

Primordial Goddess’s place setting (detail), Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–79, ceramic, porcelain, and textile, 1463 x 1463 cm (Brooklyn Museum; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

While at CalArts, Chicago and Schapiro developed the idea of “central core imagery,” arguing in a 1973 article published in Womanspace Journal that many women artists making abstract art unconsciously gravitated towards imagery that was anti-phallic. By the time she began working on The Dinner Party, Chicago had come to believe that central core imagery, which celebrated feminine eroticism and fertility, could be used to challenge patriarchal constructions of women. For Chicago, there existed an irreducible difference between men and women, and that difference began with the genitals. Chicago would eventually put vaginal imagery front and center in The Dinner Party.

Right Out of History

After several years of work establishing various feminist art programs in Southern California, Chicago was eager to get back to making her own artwork and resigned from teaching in 1974. Her experience with Womanhouse inspired her to embrace materials that had traditionally been associated with women’s crafts, such as embroidery, weaving, and china painting. She was determined to make a monument to women’s history using china-painted plates alluding to thirteen specific figures, which she originally planned to hang on the gallery wall. However, she soon realized that there were many more women that she wished to include, and the initial conception of the piece expanded to a large-scale installation with 39 place settings.

Sojourner Truth place setting (detail), Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–79, ceramic, porcelain, and textile, 1463 x 1463 cm (Brooklyn Museum; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

An important component of the piece was the educational material that represented the years of research that had been conducted by Chicago’s volunteer staff, led by art historian Diane Gelon. The Dinner Party was accompanied by a book of the same title (published by Anchor Books in 1979 and designed by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville) that included the stories behind all 1,038 names. Filmmaker Johanna Demetrakas documented the monumental effort that it took to make this installation in her film Right Out of History: The Making of the Dinner Party.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s place setting (detail), Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–79, ceramic, porcelain, and textile, 1463 x 1463 cm (Brooklyn Museum; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

In shades of brown, black, purple, and blue, turkey and duck feathers are woven together to create an impressive cloak.

Raven Custalow, Puttawus, 2020, plant-based cordage, sinew, turkey feathers, shells, and possibly copper, 109.2 x 7.6 x 123.2 cm (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond) © Raven Custalow. Speakers: Siera Hyte, Schiller Family Curator of Indigenous American Art, and Beth Harris, Smarthistory

A great example of postmodern architecture, the AT&T Building shuffles together many historical references into one late 20th-century office tower.

Philip Johnson and John Burgee, AT&T Building (later Sony Tower and 550 Madison), 1977–84 © Johnson and Burgee Associates. Speakers: Dr. Matthew A. Postal and Dr. Steven Zucker

Smith’s welded steel cube is loaded with references.

Tony Smith, Die, 1962, fabricated 1998, steel, 6 x 6 x 6 feet (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) © Tony Smith Estate. Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

Repurposed glass slides, a fire hose, linoleum tiles, and more are transformed into a meditative pavilion.

Theaster Gates, Glass Lantern Slide Pavilion, 2011, reclaimed wood, linoleum tile, carpet, fire hose, wire, metal, four ceramic teacups, 254 glass lantern slides, LED light, 243.83 x 274.31 x 243.83 cm (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond) © Theaster Gates. Speakers: Valerie Cassel Oliver, Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Steven Zucker, Smarthistory

In the second half of the 20th century, many artists turned towards their life experiences to explore both their own histories and those of their communities. For women artists and artists of color whose work has too often been neglected by exhibiting and collecting institutions, using their own lives as subject matter has been a way to declare their stories and those of their communities as worthy of attention and respect.

Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy, Chapter I: The First Holy Communion Moments Before the End, 1993, mixed-media installation (installed at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2022; photo: Katherine du Tiel) © Amalia Mesa-Bains

Autobiographical installation

The large and complex installation Venus Envy, developed by Chicana artist Amalia Mesa-Bains starting in 1993, occupies the space of four full rooms when presented in its entirety. [1] Each room, titled a “chapter,” holds a variety of objects and images appropriate to the spaces evoked: bridal boudoir, convent study, harem, mythological land of giant women, and a laboratory or medical office. The installation combines Mesa-Bains’s own life with communal experiences in women’s lives.

With a title that puns on Sigmund Freud’s “penis envy,” Mesa-Bains’s Venus Envy traces possible life stages for a Chicana woman. Fittingly, it was realized over time. The first chapter installation debuted in 1993 at the Whitney Museum, the second in 1994 at Williams College Museum of Art, the third in 1997 at the Kraus Gallery, and the fourth in 2008 at the Menil Collection. Recently, and for the first time, all four chapters were installed together for the traveling exhibition Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory. A sense of time pervades Venus Envy. Ordinary everyday objects collected from life—family photographs, a rosary, figurines, and trinkets—proliferate on tables, inside display cases, and even on the floor by visitors’ feet. The free exuberant display found in Mesa-Bains’s work and that of other Chicanx artists has been termed “rasquachismo” by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. Mesa-Bains has used the term “domesticana,” to underscore the domestic and feminist aspects of her artistic practice. Mesa-Bains’s earliest work took the form of home altars called ofrendas. Though Catholicism, a patriarchal religion, is dominated by an all-male priesthood, home altars are often created and cared for by women. Starting in the 1970s Mesa-Bains made many ofrenda installations that combined secular and sacred objects, much like the ones her grandmother kept. [2]

Amalia Mesa-Bains, Chapter II: The Harem and Other Enclosures, 1994, mixed-media installation (owned by Williams College Museum of Art, installed at El Museo del Barrio, 2024; photo: Matthew Sherman) © Amalia Mesa-Bains

Centering Chicana experience

The ofrenda follows Mesa-Bains’s life and the Chicana experience throughout Venus Envy, taking the form of a vanity table in Chapter I, a writing desk and a green armoire with open doors in Chapter II, a woman made of moss with a mirror in Chapter III, and a stainless-steel laboratory table in Chapter IV. The abundance of items assembled in a haphazard collection make deliberate reference to early modern European “cabinets of curiosities” or Wunderkammern. In these cabinets, Europeans from the 15th century on collected objects often from around the world as “curiosities” to be displayed and admired. Mesa-Bains connects their construction of “the Other” directly to anthropology and ethnography museums, e.g. “Hall of Man” exhibitions, that constructed not just the Other, but its shadow, “the Western Man.” [3] Mesa-Bains’s insistence on respect for the Chicana experience and historical contextualization can be understood as decolonial, rejecting a Eurocentric story. [4] 

Amalia Mesa-Bains was born to undocumented Mexican parents in 1943 in Santa Clara, California when the area was still an agricultural community. Childhood desires for assimilation and belonging with California’s white community ended with the realization that such dreams were unachievable. “I used to terrorize my mother to wear a certain kind of Donna Reed apron instead of her little cotton housecoat because I wanted her to be American,” Mesa-Bains said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. “Then as my childhood and early adolescence unfolded, I realized nope, nobody’s being fooled, you are not American in their eyes.” [5] 

Chicana awakening occurred at San José State University where she earned a bachelor’s degree in painting in 1966. There Mesa-Bains encountered the Chicano Movement and saw Chicano playwright Luis Valdez’s first full-length play “The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa” produced on campus in 1963. Mesa-Bains later said, “He scared the living daylights out of me because up until that point I was trying really hard to be white.” [6]

Mesa-Bains started exploring the Chicana experience both as an artist and as a scholar. She earned an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Education at San Francisco State University followed by an M.A. in 1980 and Ph.D. in 1983 in Clinical Psychology from the Wright Institute. With its elaborate intimate spaces of a Chicana woman’s life, Venus Envy presents the psychological depth and complications of womanhood over time.

Ofrenda on the vanity (details), Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy, Chapter I: The First Holy Communion Moments Before the End, 1993, mixed-media installation (installed at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2022; photo: Katherine du Tiel) © Amalia Mesa-Bains

Venus Envy’s four chapters

Archetypes of the bride, the Catholic Virgin Mary, and the Mexica (Aztec) goddess Coatlicue populate Chapter I: The First Holy Communion Moments Before the End. Mesa-Bains’s own First Communion dress from her childhood can be found in a vitrine echoing the bride’s white bouquet that lies on a satin-wrapped chair. Figurines of the Virgin Mary can be found among the perfume bottles, family photos, and pearls adorning the dressing table, but when the bride looks in the mirror, her visage will be reflected through an image of Coatlicue.

Amalia Mesa-Bains, Chapter II: The Harem and Other Enclosures, 1994, mixed-media installation (owned by Williams College Museum of Art, installed at El Museo del Barrio, 2024; photo: Matthew Sherman) © Amalia Mesa-Bains

Chapter II: The Harem and Other Enclosures suggests three locations in which women claimed freedom for themselves in homosocial spaces despite restrictions placed upon women’s lives in their societies. “Sor Juana’s Library” imagines the study of the celebrated 17th-century Mexican scholar, poet, and nun who argued for women’s intellectual rights. The Bishop of Puebla eventually confiscated her books and scientific equipment after objecting to Sor Juana’s unabashed feminist writing that criticized sexism and misogyny. In the installation, that has yet to happen. Scientific instruments, photographs, candlesticks, and a receipt paper detailing varies statistics occupy the desk. In the 2023 iteration, the receipt paper tracked the Latino populations of major U.S. cities, the states with highest Latino populations, Latino percentage of U.S. prison population, and Latino COVID-19 deaths. 

A harem and a European garden add two more full vignettes to Chapter II. A harem, household quarters exclusively for women, jointly restricts the movements of women while providing a space relatively free of patriarchal dominance. Colored window panels suggest a rich life inside. The “Virgin’s Garden” plays on the Christian idea of the hortus conclusus, the “closed garden” as an analogy for virginity. Among green moss, trees, and ever more trinkets, the green armoire reflects the visitor through an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe (like the Coatlicue in Chapter I), emblazoned on its mirrored door.

Amalia Mesa-Bains, Chapter III: Cihuatlampa, the Place of the Giant Women, 1997, mixed-media installation (owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, installed at El Museo del Barrio, 2024; photo: Matthew Sherman) © Amalia Mesa-Bains

For Chapter III: Cihuatlampa, the Place of the Giant Women, Mesa-Bains envisioned the Mexica mythical land of women who had died in childbirth—considered equal to warriors who died in battle. A verdant woman sprawls recumbent on a floor of mosses and natural growth while regarding herself in a mirror on the gallery floor. Like the mirrors of Chapters I and II, her visage is reflected through an archetype, this time the Virgin of Montserrat, a Black Virgin Mary iteration. Mesa-Bains sees the Virgin connected to the Indigenous Tonantzin mother goddess. A giant copper tunic and feather vestment hang nearby for the giant women. Images of the artist’s mother, female Catholic figures, and Mexica deities can be found on the wall. 

Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy Chapter IV: The Road to Paris and Its Aftermath, The Curandera’s Botanica, 2008, mixed media installation (owned by the National Gallery of Art, installed at The Menil Collection, 2008) © Amalia Mesa-Bains

Chapter IV: The Road to Paris and Its Aftermath, The Curandera’s Botanica, joined Venus Envy in 2008, five years after a near-fatal car accident that broke Mesa-Bains’s neck, leg, and arm. The antiseptic metal chest and table hold glass jars, family mementos, and a wealth of dried medicinal plants used by a curandera, a traditional Mexican healer. A portrait of Mesa-Bains’s grandmother, Mariana Escobedo Mesa, herself a curandera, glows in a light box mounted on the wall. 

By weaving her own life history with Mexican history, and women’s history, Mesa-Bains invites the viewer to see themselves as an individual connected to larger histories of struggle, community, and the constant urge for self-determination. She rejects Eurocentric narratives that claim universality, but ignore the lives of women and people of color. With specificity and numerous tactile objects, the artist insists on an attentive, full history outside the exoticism of the cabinet of curiosities.

Lee-Smith paints a world in decay, but despite the bleak atmosphere, the artist still includes symbols of hope.

Hughie Lee-Smith, The Walls, 1954, oil on board, 61 x 91.4 cm (Art Bridges) © Estate of Hughie Lee-Smith. Speakers: Julia Mun, Assistant Curator, Art Bridges Foundation, and Steven Zucker, Smarthistory

In this harsh city scene, Lovelace highlights the skills of survival and resilience.

Michelangelo Lovelace, Streetology, 1999, acrylic on canvas, 135.9 x 177.8 cm (Akron Art Museum) © Estate of Michelangelo Lovelace. Speakers: Dr. Jeffrey Katzin, Senior Curator, Akron Art Museum and Dr. Steven Zucker, Smarthistory

Much like the cover of a comic book, Choi’s animated painting tells the stories of heroes and villains in an imagined universe.

JooYoung Choi, Journey to the Cosmic Womb, 2018, acrylic and paper on canvas, 203.2 x 152.4 cm (Art Bridges) © JooYoung Choi. Speakers: Dr. Karintha Lowe, Assistant Curator, Houghton Library, Harvard University, and Dr. Steven Zucker, Smarthistory, at the Hudson River Museum

Despite the application of rosebuds and glitter, this painting is anything but delicate.

Joan Snyder, Roxy Red Fugue, 2017, oil, acrylic, cloth, rosebuds, glitter, and plastic jewels on linen, 127 x 198.1 cm (Art Bridges) © Joan Snyder. Speakers: Shilpi Chandra, Assistant Curator, Hudson River Museum and Steven Zucker, Smarthistory

Planes of pink, purple, and green give form to a woman’s silhouette, while a bouquet of peonies suggests the blossoming of feminist art.

Kay WalkingStick, Peonies, 1969, acrylic on canvas, 142.2 x 121.9 cm (Art Bridges) © Kay WalkingStick. Speakers: Bill Conger, Chief Curator, Peoria Riverfront Museum and Beth Harris, Smarthistory

Recalling ancient art and modern literature, Noguchi’s sculpture pulls on ideas of the fixed/eternal and the fluid/present.

Isamu Noguchi, Gregory (Effigy), 1945, cast 1964, bronze, 175.6 x 41 x 41.9 cm (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville) © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. Speakers: Dr. Jen Padgett, Windgate Curator of Craft, and Dr. Steven Zucker, Smarthistory

Set in Los Angeles’ Hollywood Forever cemetery, Saldamando’s loving portrait of two friends captures an authentic moment in time and place.

Shizu Saldamando, Sandra and Tammy, Hollywood Forever, 2013, mixed media on panel, 121.9 x 152.4 cm (Art Bridges) © Shizu Saldamando. Speakers: Dr. Karintha Lowe, Assistant Curator, Houghton Library, Harvard University and Dr. Steven Zucker, Smarthistory

Yolanda López, Guadalupe Triptych, 1978 (left: “Victoria F. Franco: Our Lady of Guadalupe,” oil pastel and collage on paper, 30 x 22 inches; center: “Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe,” oil pastel and paint on paper, 30 x 22 inches; right: “Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe,” oil pastel and paint on paper, 30 x 22 inches) © 1978 Yolanda López

Miguel Cabrera, Altarpiece of the Virgin of Guadalupe with Saint John the Baptist, Fray Juan de Zumárraga and Juan Diego, 18th century, oil on copper (Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City)

Some people became so upset over the paintings, they broke gallery windows. They called the artist’s home and made bomb threats. Yolanda López’s small paintings reimagining the Virgin of Guadalupe immediately roused strong feelings. The artworks depict López’s female family members with elements drawn from the popular image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.  The Virgin of Guadalupe combines elements of European Catholic Virgin Mary imagery with the Mexica (Aztec) mother goddess Tonantzin (also known as Coatlicue). Though some found López’s Virgin of Guadalupe Triptych sacrilegious, others saw what López intended: a feminist claim to the heroism of Chicana women in all their variety. 

The origin story of the Virgin of Guadalupe is syncretic. The Virgin Mary appeared to an Indigenous Nahua man named Juan Diego at the hill of Tepeyac (today in Mexico City), at the site where a shrine to the Mexica mother goddess already existed. The Virgin requested that a shrine be built in her honor on the location, but when Juan Diego related this to the local bishop, he was skeptical. It was only when the bishop saw the miraculous image of the Virgin of Guadalupe imprinted on Diego’s cloak that he believed him. That image is said to be the one hanging in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe to this day. In the centuries that followed, images of the Virgin of Guadalupe proliferated.

Art and activism

Yolanda López, Free Los Siete, 1969, offset lithograph on paper, 56.5 x 36.2 cm (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.) © 1969 Yolanda López

Yolanda López, a third-generation Chicana, was born in 1942 in the Barrio Logan district of San Diego, California. López later recalled being baptized at the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe there. Though her family was not religious, López’s mother saw the benefit of the Catholic daycare sliding scale and enrolled her. [1] The Virgin of Guadalupe therefore formed more of a cultural figure than a devotional one for López, though she was certainly aware of the figure’s religious relevance. 

In the 1960s studying at College of Marin and San Francisco State University, López became active in the burgeoning Chicano civil rights movement. She participated in the Third World Liberation Front, the student coalition demanding ethnic studies curriculum in the longest student strike in U.S. history starting in 1968. In 1969 López supported Los Siete de la Raza, seven Latinx youths accused falsely of killing a police officer in the Mission district of San Francisco, by creating protest art among other activities.  

Virgin of Guadalupe Triptych

In the 1970s López returned to San Diego. During MFA studies at the University of California, San Diego, López made art that plumbed her own life, exploring Chicana identity. Frustrated at the lack of Latinos and Chicanos pictured in media, López took on the famous and freighted image, the Virgin of Guadalupe, in visual language that freely “crosses the borders of various pictorial traditions, paralleling Chicano Spanish.” [2] The resulting images have been understood as part of a new “mestiza consciousness,” a multiethnic understanding of identity in the modern era. [3]

The Virgin of Guadalupe series, López’s best known body of work, comprises paintings, drawings, prints, and collages made between 1978–88. The best-known of the series is the triptych of three individually titled paintings that portray López’s grandmother, her mother, and herself with iconography borrowed from the Virgin of Guadalupe. Each painting shows the contemporary woman with the 16th-century Catholic Virgin of Guadalupe’s starred mantle, brilliant halo, and accompanying angel.  

Yolanda López, “Guadalupe: Victoria F. Franco,” from the Guadalupe Triptych, 1978, oil pastel and paint on paper, 30 x 22 inches © 1978 Yolanda López

“Guadalupe: Victoria F. Franco” begins the generational trio on the left. López’s grandmother sits demurely on a stool draped with the Virgin of Guadalupe’s blue and gold cloak. Furrows in her brown skin and graying hair pulled back neatly declare her age. In a collared pink dress styled as a standard work outfit, Franco appears enthroned, silhouetted against a full mandorla framing her against the background’s celestial blue. A brown-skinned angel with wings the colors of Mexico’s flag holds a garland of roses, a symbol of the Virgin Mary.

Left: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The Immaculate Conception, 1767–69, oil on canvas, 281 x 155 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid); right: Coatlicue, c. 1500, Mexica (Aztec), found on the SE edge of the Plaza Mayor/Zócalo in Mexico City, basalt, 257 cm high (National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The crescent moon brooch and flayed snakeskin in Franco’s hands could remind viewers of snakes found in Virgin of the Immaculate Conception imagery from which the Guadalupe form is derived. The snake also can reference the Mexica mother goddess Tonantzin, also known as Coatlicue, who wears a skirt of snakes. Divine imagery and the enthroned pose dignify the figure even while López insists on Franco’s ordinary individual humanity.

Yolanda López, “Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe,” from the Guadalupe Triptych, 1978, oil pastel and paint on paper, 30 x 22 inches © 1978 Yolanda López

López’s mother wears a pink dress and is bent over a sewing machine in the triptych’s center painting, “Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe.” An angel with the same green, white, and red wings as in “Guadalupe: Victoria F. Franco” rests on his elbows in the pose of the well-known putto in Raphael’s 16th-century Sistine Madonna. A flame-colored mandorla illuminates Franco’s workstation. López portrays her mother actively sewing the Virgin of Guadalupe’s starred blue mantle. The compositional choice inverts the power hierarchy between the divine figure and the humans she is said to protect—here, in a way, López is crediting Latina and Chicana women with the creation of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Yolanda López, “Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe,” from the Guadalupe Triptych, 1978, oil pastel and paint on paper, 30 x 22 inches © 1978 Yolanda López

The most reproduced painting in the triptych is “Portrait of the Artist as The Virgin of Guadalupe.” Once again, a figure in Guadalupan pink occupies the center of the composition backed by a bright mandorla halo. This time is it López herself, in running shoes, striding joyfully, holding the Virgin of Guadalupe’s mantle across her shoulders like a marathon runner’s victory flag. During graduate school López began running, a practice she found liberating. In the painting, she clutches a snake by the neck in her right hand as her feet pass over an angelic figure, this time, one with wings of red, white, and blue—the colors of the U.S. flag. With full self-possession, López bounds forward carrying a history, but unburdened by it.

Why Guadalupe?

Why would a 20th-century artist portray three generations of her own not-religious family in the imagery of a 16th-century Catholic iteration of the Virgin Mary? Few figures carry as much freighted meaning as the Virgin of Guadalupe. Cast as an aspirational model for women, introduced by Spanish colonizers, and later used as a rallying image for Mexican independence by Miguel Hidalgo in 1810, the Virgin of Guadalupe has borne many meanings. The first iteration of the Virgin Mary to be attached explicitly to the Americas, the Virgin of Guadalupe has become a symbol for Mexican and Chicanx identity and political independence.

Virgin of Guadalupe, 16th century, oil and possibly tempera on maguey cactus cloth and cotton (Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City; photo: Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P., CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Today, mounted in a golden frame, the original Virgin of Guadalupe image receives millions of pilgrims annually in a basilica in Mexico City dedicated to the figure it depicts. Backed by a mandorla, the Virgin Mary folds her hands in prayer demurely while standing on a crescent moon above a seraph (holy winged-being) with red, white, and blue wings. Her blue mantle and pink dress adhere to standard European iconography for the Madonna. The crescent moon at her feet and stars on the mantle refer to Immaculate Conception and Madonna of the Apocalypse imagery. 

Other elements refer to the Americas. The black ribbon tied at her waist mimics the listón negro, a sign of maternity worn by Indigenous pregnant people. Her “ashen” skin color, the stars on the blue mantle, and crescent moon at the figure’s feet recall the Mexica Tonantzin who gave birth to the moon and stars. The flowers on the Virgin’s dress are similar in form to the Nahuatl glyph for heart, which was considered the source of the human soul. [4] Feathered angel wings are not far from the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl. The Virgin of Guadalupe’s noted gray-ish skin color has been seen as a reference to Indigenous skin tones and possibly the ritual ash applied to skin by Mexica priests during rituals. The “Guadalupe” name itself comes from a Black-skinned Madonna in Extremadura, Spain. 

Modern women and Guadalupe

López’s vibrant modern women displace the still, statuesque demeanor of the 16th-century Guadalupe image with active movement and individual life. In López’s triptych, women do not have to become the Virgin of Guadalupe; everyday women can be honored as they are. [5] The legacy of Guadalupe does not weigh on López, her mother, and grandmother but can be used as each creates her own individual life. Her feminist rendition celebrates individual life paths and the autonomous choices that create them.

Overstreet’s tent-like painting combines the artist’s interest in color field painting and the Black Arts Movement.

Joe Overstreet, Boxes, 1970, acrylic on constructed canvas with metal grommets and cotton rope, 292.1 x 171.5 x 121.9 cm (Art Bridges) © estate of the artist. Speakers: Shilpi Chandra, Assistant Curator, Hudson River Museum and Steven Zucker, Smarthistory

Bontecou’s steel and canvas form appears both threatening and vulnerable, situated squarely in the Cold War era that it was created.

Lee Bontecou, Untitled (No. 25), 1960, welded steel, canvas, copper wire, 182.88 x 142.24 x 50.8 cm (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond) © Estate of Lee Bontecou. Speakers: Dr. Sarah Eckhardt, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Dr. Steven Zucker, Smarthistory

Bradford’s painting draws from ancient Greek myth to celebrate a space beloved to him: his mother’s beauty parlor.

Mark Bradford, Thelxiepeia, 2016, mixed media on canvas, 243.8 x 548.6 cm (Art Bridges) © Mark Bradford. Speakers: Laura Vookles, Chair, Curatorial Department, Hudson River Museum and Steven Zucker, Smarthistory