Icons of love and devotion: Alma Lopez's art.(Critical essay)

KNOWN FOR HER STUNNING digital montages as well as for her feminist reconceptualization of traditional Mexican iconography, Chicana artist Alma Lopez has emerged as one of the leading voices in the Chicana/o art scene who addresses the perilous intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality with her visual work. Born in Mexico but raised in Los Angeles, Lopez came of age as an artist in the late 1990s, although she witnessed the Chicana/o arts renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s as a child and adolescent. Like prior Chicana feminist artists, Lopez has challenged the exclusion and/or erasure of female agency within conventional Mexican and Chicano nationalist imagery. Although Chicano nationalist discourses understood empowerment primarily in male terms, Lopez's work places women at the center of discourses on emancipation and decolonization. Her imagery also expounds what gender scholars would call a Chicana queer aesthetic, as much of her work explores the contours of lesbian desire and sexuality at a time when issues of race and sexuality were often articulated independently and even in opposition to one another.

Although Lopez is a talented and skilled painter, printmaker, photographer, and video artist as well as a committed community activist, she is best known for the moniker, "the digital diva." (1) The artist often recounts that when she was first introduced to the computer as an artistic medium, she immediately "clicked" with this new tool in part because of its ability to transform pre-existing imagery. (2) Digital art refers to work produced with a computer as an artistic tool. Images are generally created with software like Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, among others. Artists then produce high-resolution printouts of the images for the purposes of exhibitions and sales. One of the most salient characteristics of digital media is its ability to manipulate and transform pre-existing imagery in seamless and organic ways, thus allowing artists to bring together images produced with different media and within different contexts. Lopez's digital work differs from her nondigital oeuvre in that it features layers of different images that are digitally woven together. These usually include hand-drawn or painted motifs, photography, and pre-existing archival/historical material. Thus digital media allows Lopez to piece together images from previously fragmented histories in her work.

Lopez also belongs to a generation of Chicana artists who have begun using computer technology as a viable and potentially empowering medium for creative expression. (3) By using this medium, they are infringing on a territory that has traditionally excluded their presence as women of color, namely the realm of science and technology. Lopez's use of digital imagery also counters the paradigm of the digital divide, which maintains that ethnic minorities have limited access to digital technologies, an idea that many media and race scholars have denounced as a self-fulfilling prophecy. (4) This relatively new artistic tool has also allowed Lopez to engage in various forms of cyber activism through the construction and maintenance of her own artist's website (www.almalopez.net). Not only does this websites contain low-resolution scans of her artwork as well as her biography, it is also an open forum for the public discussion of issues that affect Chicana/o/Latina/o and queer communities of color. The site contains a blog as well as public postings of e-mail messages that the artist has received throughout her career.

Lopez's work centers around a feminist and queer re-thinking of traditional Mexican icons, many of which are imbued with a deeply ingrained patriarchal discourse. The Virgin of Guadalupe--a popular symbol of Mexican/Chicana/o spirituality and cultural resistance from the seventeenth century to the present--has become the object of feminist critique among Chicana artists since the 1970s. In Mexican culture, the Virgin of Guadalupe represents the ideal woman, one who is motherly yet asexual and one who is culturally relevant yet inescapably passive and submissive. More than two decades after the acclaimed pastel drawings Guadalupe Series (1978) by Yolanda Lopez (no relation to Alma) and Ester Hernandez's radically feminist lithograph La Virgen de Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de los Xicanos (1975), Alma Lopez tapped into the cultural and political popularity of the Guadalupe when she produced her controversial digital print Our Lady (1999) (fig. 1). In February 2001 Lopez showed this work in the Museum of Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as part of their "Cyber Arte: Tradition Meets Technology" exhibition. The image sparked heated objections from a mob of protesters led by community activist Jose Villegas and New Mexico Archbishop Michael J. Sheehan, who called for its removal from the museum (5). In spite of the public hostility around Lopez's image (she even received death threats), the museum curators refused to remove the image, and the exhibition remained open for its originally scheduled run. The artist would later post on her website many of the thousands of e-mails she received, both in support of and in opposition to her work. This virtual discussion space became a platform for broader discussions around religion/spirituality, cultural identity, sexuality, freedom of expression, intolerance, and so forth.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Why did Our Lady cause such an uproar? The image is composed of a digital montage depicting performance artist Raquel Salinas cast in the role of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who here defiantly returns her gaze to the viewer, a far cry from the downturned eyes of the Guadalupe in traditional iconography. Lopez's Lady wears a rose bikini, a reference to the association of the Virgin Mary with this particular flower, and a blue mantle revealing the relief surface of the stone sculpture of Coyolxauh-qui, the Aztec moon goddess. This modern-day Guadalupe is being held up not by an angel but rather by the figure of a bare-chested Raquel Gutierrez, cultural activist and personal friend of the artist. Gutierrez sports a pair of Monarch butterfly wings, an iconographic motif that is particularly significant to Lopez, as she explains:

 
  The Monarch butterfly is most known for its natural yearly migration 
  from Mexico to the northern U.S. However, the most remarkable aspect 
  of this migration is that on its flight back to Mexico or the 
  northern U.S. it is no longer the original butterfly, but it is the 
  child returning on genetic memory. Like the Monarch butterfly, 
  indigenous people of this continent have migrated between both 
  countries. (6)